Beyond Othello: Juan Latino in Black America

Abstract

This essay focusses on references to the sixteenth-century black poet and scholar Juan Latino in African American journals in the 1920s–1940s. Although Juan Latino is largely forgotten in the present day, publications such as the Journal of Negro History and the New Negro referred to the poet as an important figure in the intellectual history of the African diaspora. My essay posits Juan Latino (both the historical figure and an early modern play about him) as an alternative exemplar of blackness in early modern Europe to that found in Othello. By turning to Juan Latino instead of to Othello, scholars in the 1920s–1940s were able to suggest a transnational and transhistorical black diasporic identity linked with African American solidarity with the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.