Hiding in Plain Sight: The Construction of Invisibility

I started my research project with one 'invisibility': there weren’t black poets in early modern Spain other than Juan Latino – the black professor at the University of Granada. After several years working on the period’s literary legacy of black women and men, I have come to realize that ‘the invisible’ is not always about lack of data but about what we want to see (or what we do not want to see) with the data we have at hand.

For instance, look at the painting Vittore Carpaccio, Gli alabardieri, Uffizi Gallery (Florence), ca. 1490-1493

Looking at this picture long enough, one comes to discover that there is a black soldier under the red beret. He is hiding in plain sight. And so do black poets in early modern Spain.

However, scholars of literature have too often overlooked their presence. The initial 'invisibility' of my project (the idea that there were no black poets) was there because we haven’t even named the possibility. Therefore, my research has begun with the word: ‘the intangible poetic legacy of black Africans in early modern Spain’ (see my article at?https://lnkd.in/dpgbuq6q ).

These and other examples have encouraged Prof Elena Lombardi (University of Oxford) and me to lead a project on the construction of invisibility, currently funded by Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute (https://lnkd.in/dFHVJMe2 ).

Is invisibility a matter of reconstruction, point of view, and, importantly, stance (as proposed by Kate Lowe in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, 2005)? What are the power structures that construct the invisible?

I will keep you posted with our future outcomes!