Colonial Blackness

A History of Afro-Mexico
by Herman L. Bennett

Indiana University Press

—

2009

Putting on My Blackness
Relief Print (1987)

Professor of History at Rutgers University, Herman Bennett, selected this relief print, Putting on My Blackness, 1987, for the cover of his book, Colonial Blackness - A History of Afro-Mexico, published by Indiana University Press, 2009.

Asking readers to imagine a history of Mexico narrated through the experiences of Africans and their descendants, this book offers a radical reconfiguration of Latin American history. Using ecclesiastical and inquisitorial records, Herman L. Bennett frames the history of Mexico around the private lives and liberty that Catholicism engendered among enslaved Africans and free blacks, who became majority populations soon after the Spanish conquest. The resulting history of 17th-century Mexico brings forth tantalizing personal and family dramas, body politics, and stories of lost virtue and sullen honor. By focusing on these phenomena among peoples of African descent, rather than the conventional history of Mexico with the narrative of slavery to freedom figured in, Colonial Blackness presents the colonial drama in all its untidy detail.