Padilioni 1

Nigra Sum, Sed Formosa : Visualizing a Radical Black

Consciousness in Aponte’s Libro de Pinturas

On 19 March 1812, following two months of deadly slave

uprisings on plantations in Bayamo, Holguin, and La Habana, Cuban

authorities raided the home of and arrested José Antonio Aponte.

Aponte, a free moreno living in the barrios extramuros of La Habana,

was believed to be the chief instigator and mastermind behind the

ill-fated attempt to overthrow the slavocracy in Cuba --

following the recent example of Haitian liberation. Among the

evidence presented by authorities against Aponte was his libro de

pinturas, a volume spanning 72 plates of images and text that

represented everything from maps of streets and military

garrisons in Cuba, depictions of Black soldiers (possibly

Haitian) defeating Whites, sketches of revolutionary leaders

including George Washington, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-

Jacques Dessalines, and scenes of Ancient Africa’s storied past

such as Abyssinian kings, black cardinals at the Vatican, and

well-known African saints (Childs 2006; Franco 2010 :XI). These

images, when taken together with other circumstantial evidence

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related to Aponte’s associates, indexed a counter-consciousness

deemed seditious and threatening to a Spanish colonial empire

that was already beginning to tear at the seams due to the pull

of humanist political rhetoric circulating the Atlantic littoral

world. After three weeks of intense trial examination in which

Aponte detailed the meanings behind each plate image, Aponte was

put to death on 9 April, his decapitated head and hands being

displayed as a didactic demonstration of Spanish sovereignty over

enslaved bodies "in the most public and convenient location to

offer a warning lesson to his followers” (Childs 2006).

Though historians have assigned the conspiracy of 1812 his

name, there is no conclusive evidence to directly tie José

Antonio Aponte to the slave revolts that unfolded across the

island of Cuba. Nevertheless, the execution of José Antonio

Aponte represents a key moment in the account of African

Diasporan consciousness in the Americas. Aponte’s libro was an

artistic manifesto of freely disassembled and reassembled icons

and symbols of the Catholic Church and Hispanic visual culture,

arranged as the product of Aponte’s mind. Aponte employed this

intertextual assemblage to mobilize memory, hearkening to Ancient

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Africa’s Christian past and eschatological future, a radical

cosmovision of African futurity untainted by the stain of

slavery’s shackles. This study seeks to foreground Aponte’s

libro, placing it upon the witness stand for one more round of

interrogation. But instead of seeking to gather information about

Aponte as an individual actor and sole creator of the libro, I

argue that the libro is a collective co-creation of the African

Diaspora writ large, a flowering of the numerous rhizomatic lines

of flight and fright (Deleuze & Guattari 1980[1987])

characterizing the life worlds of black chattel slavery extending

from West African slave fortresses, through the harrowing

experience of the Middle Passage, and continuing into American

slave ports.1 The recursive, surrogatory nature of Afro-Atlantic

litoral culture (Gundaker 1998:7; Roach 1996:2) forms the

catalyzing context for the raw symbolic materials of Aponte’s

artistic labor.

Using elements of Aponte’s libro, I will sketch the rough

outlines of an Atlantic African Diasporan black political

theology. This study is not exhaustive, as 72 plates of images

1 For clarification, “American” is used throughout this paper geographically in reference to the continent, not politically referring to the United States.

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would exceed the reasonable expectations of any reader’s

attention, but will limit its analysis to the surrounding milieu

of three of Aponte’s religious representations: plate forty-five

relating to the story of St. Efigenia, and plate forty-six

depicting (among other figures) St. Benito de Palermo and Maria

Santisima de Regla, known as the “black virgin.” Tracing the

genealogies of the cults of devotion and the visual grammar

accompanying the above representations from Iberia and the

Mediterranean World into Spanish America maps the trajectories of

the accumulated/ing, palimpsestic significances that constellated

around these figures, the nonlocal, discontinuous starts and

stops in their historical developments, and the differing

semiotic registers of Catholic symbolism as practiced among elite

and non-elite communities, Spanish criollos and racialized castas.

From this perspective, Aponte’s libro forms a nodal point in the

material and imaginary networks interconnecting the African

Diaspora, and represents a moment of conjuncture in which the

nonlinear, disjunct movements of symbolic circulation came

together within the bricolage of one medium. The logic guiding

Aponte’s strategic harnessing and repurposing of these symbols

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reveals an Afrocentric consciousness that extended throughout the

time-space of the African Diaspora. The perseverance of this

consciousness and its deployment as a disrupting force to the

systems of racial and economic devaluation fall into the

analytical category of Blackness when Blackness is understood in

“anti-anti-essentialist” terms (Gilroy 1992) -- racialized

subjectivity produced by social practices and technologies

enacted upon certain bodies perceived as raced by the

functionings of power. This approach locates Blackness within

historically-situated social structures that cluster around the

racialized body, but do not result from an essentialized,

ahistorical somatic feature. The work of Aponte, often known as

“Black” José Aponte, can be described as Black because his

repertoire of skills, dispositions, and tactics derive from and

address (directly or indirectly) systems of White supremacy -- a

defining feature of black chattel slavery that unites the

diversity of experiences encountered by racialized subjects

throughout the timespace of the African Diaspora.

Through this lens, the sociality of Black life and its

refusal to yield to Enlightenment models of humanism transform

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Aponte’s libro de pinturas from the Romantically-conceived visual

creation of a lone artist into a multivoiced aural production of

Black ensemble (Moten 2004), whose mighty chorus of hums, shouts,

and exclamations reveal the yearnings of diasporan peoples.

Aponte’s libro forms a sacred site of memory in the long

tradition of Black radicalism and political theology, and this

liberatory project of Blackness - imposed upon the African

Diaspora by historical circumstance - is one that is actualized

and realized out of the “fugitive movements” of an a priori

consciousness that was (and is) at once always already

intuitively free (Moten 2008).

The Materiality of the Libro

Following information gathered after the slave uprisings in

January and February 1812, Cuban military office Vicente de la

Huerta began searching houses in the barrios extramuros where it

was suspected the conspiracy started. Upon sweeping Aponte’s

house which also doubled as his sculpting workshop, Huerta

discovered the “book of various plans and drawings, hidden with

clothes in a dresser” (Childs 2006:3). Aponte’s libro is a 72-

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plate “snapshot” of the thoughts and ideas swirling in the mind

of the free moreno painter. Indeed, it was the libro’s

materiality that translated Aponte’s invisible imagination into a

visible, tangible assemblage of characters, icons, allegories,

hieroglyphics, verses, maps, landscapes, cities, symbols, colors

and texts - realized through the mediation of paper, glue, and

ink. Believed to have been destroyed by Cuban authorities, the

libro’s existence and content only “speak” today through the

recorded testimony of Aponte’s trial during which prosecutor José

Maria Nerey questioned Aponte to give semantic explanations for

the particular arrangement of his visual manifesto. As such, our

interaction with the libro is already mediated and filtered

through the structuring power of legal testimony as presented in

criminal and inquisitorial records, described by historian Carlo

Ginzburg as “archives of repression” (1989:157). It is important

to note that everything we can know about the libro first passed

through the systems of power undergirding the colonial order and

the slavery system in Cuba, and as such, we know the libro

through representation alone. Despite having his testimony

extracted by the Spanish state under duress asymmetrical power

Padilioni 8

dynamics, there are still ways that one can read through the

extant trial records and descriptions of the libro in an effort

to resurrect Aponte’s dormant voice. Through the libro, it is

possible to discover the active role Aponte played in his dual

efforts “to write [his] own history…” and “influence how that

history would and could be told by later historians” (Childs

2006:9).

The libro de pinturas contains a “hurricane of images”

(Hernandez 2010:XI) that can be classified into roughly five

overlapping categories of visual representations circulating the

Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1992) and available to Aponte as material

resources to be "excerpted, quoted, revitalized, reinterpreted,

or recontextualized” (Gundaker 1998:12). These (sometimes

overlapping) groupings include: 1) personal biography and

genealogy, such as plate nineteen that detailed the role played

by Aponte’s grandfather, Captain Joaquín Aponte, during the 1762

British siege of Havana, 2) military representations - scenes of

battles, maps of garrisons in Cuba, which articulated with

portraits found in Aponte’s house but separate from the libro

inspired by the rash of liberal revolutions sweeping the Western

Padilioni 9

world, including Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean

François, Jean-Jacques Dessalines -- all black heroes of the

Haitian Revolution -- and an “effigy of general Guasinton

[Washington]” of the newly-formed United States (Childs 2006:28).

3) Tropes of neoclassicism and ancient mythology as seen in

depictions of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, such as plate

thirty-nine depicting the goddess Venus next to a large tower and

a ship with her son Cupid on the mast along with the god Neptune

or plate forty-one that featured the temple of Diana in Ephesus

(Franco 2010[1977]:114-5). 4) Ancient Africa including many

depictions of Abyssinian/Nubian/Ethiopian royalty and of Egypt,

including representations of the Nile River and the pyramids of

Egypt on plate forty-two (Franco 2010[1977]:115), and 5)

Catholic symbolism, iconography, and Christian hagiography as

expressed in paintings of the Vatican, African saints, and

popular religious figures.

Aponte’s wide variety and diversity of representational

idioms testifies to the circulation networks of Havana in the

early 19th century and their diffused cultural contents. Attempts

to delineate or identify the various traditions within which

Padilioni 10

Aponte worked as an artist into categories of either Africanness or

Europeanness prove futile and reify these perceived distinctions

into cohesive and bounded entities - a situation that

historically did not exist. The case of Aponte frustrates the

search for provenance and origins in visual art, as Cuba formed

an important junction in the “Atlantic matrix” linking locations

in Africa with both Europe and the Caribbean and generating

“diverse patterns of circulation” of heterogeneous cultural forms

(Palmié 2002:142). Furthermore, Palmié reminds scholars of

Caribbean cultures that the interwoven nature of Caribbean

cultural and ethnic diversity structures conditions in which

cultural actors could “select symbolic forms from a number of

sources” and through this agential act of selection either

actively or reactively “confirm[ed], contest[ed], or

reformulat[ed] historical arrangements of power and identity

associated with the use of such forms” (2002:143).

Aponte’s Animating Afrocentricity

Despite the manifestations of cultural hybridity in the

formal presentation of Aponte’s libro, Africanity pervades its

Padilioni 11

political significances (Hernandez 2010:L). Though specific

cultural citations in the libro index African history and

peoples, on a primary level Aponte’s libro received

materialization as a result of “preexisting organizations of

thought and perception” (Palmié 2002:155) - Aponte’s Afrocentric

consciousness. It is the unfettered “free irruption of thought”

that characterizes the human imagination that forms the crucial

site of inspection for this research, because it is here in the

realm of the intuitive that the first movements of resistance

against the imposition of a categorical identification (slave,

black, etc.) can be detected, in a process theorist Fred Moten

deems a “radical politics of the imagination” (2004:270). In this

we see the beginnings of a collective consciousness with a

decidedly-African sensibility, and one that questioned the logics

of slavery.

Aponte articulated an Afrocentric mindset through his

appropriation of Catholic symbolism, interweaving well-known

iconographic figures into the texture of his libro’s political

theology (Schmitt 2005[1922]) that invoked the absolute

sovereignty of God as a negation of earthly systems of human

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power and authority. Extrapolating Aponte’s theory through his

praxis -- the material instantiation of his counter-consciousness

-- is the chief concern of the following pages. Harnessing the

power of the imagination through the creation of art, Aponte

theorized about his world and the racist manner in which Spanish

sovereignty structured it, while also seeing in Catholic

symbolism an alternative eschatological vision of a world in

which Spanish sovereignty was not the final say, one in which the

color of one’s skin did not immediately devalue and stricture the

potentiality of humanity. Aponte’s visionquest painted a world

that did not solely relegate the black body to the realm of a

depersonalized commodified object, but rather opened up space for

the flourishing of the black soul, and this reality of the

speaking commodity, to use Karl Marx’s terminology, mounted a

direct challenge to the economic logics of slavery by

“[testifying] to the fact that objects can and do resist” (Moten

2003:1).

Aponte’s libro can be described as a case of creolization as

well, as symbols of the Roman Catholic Church received

recontextualized significance when run through the cognitive filter

Padilioni 13

(Ginzburg 1992) of Aponte’s Afrocentric consciousness, providing

the formal arrangement of his libro, that, when read within the

context of the greater Atlantic world, formed a visual protest

against systems of White supremacy through the process of

doubling. Gundaker defines doubling as “two or more ways to

say/hear, inscribe/interpret, or see/represent" that is helpful

for "describ[ing] processes of creolization" in a way that

acknowledges the "dual or multiple factors" involved in the

interaction and "establishes an oscillation between contrasting

perspectives" without reifying them into oppositional entities

(1998:11). One can see the traces of such doubling in plate

thirty-seven, which featured Pope Clement surrounded by two

priests - one a cardinal and the other the Pope’s librarian -

both described by Aponte as morenos belonging to the Order of St.

Benedict (an Afro-Italian saint that will be discussed

forthrightly). On the surface, such an image may seem like a

benign representation of Catholic faith, but Nerey’s questioning

of Aponte on the significance of the pope being flanked by

African religious shows his suspicion that there was an

alternative meaning of such symbolism. Nerey pressed Aponte to

Padilioni 14

tell him what type of occasion would two moreno religious be with

the pope at the Vatican, to which Aponte deftly replied that he

could not specify, since "no lo ha leído y lo sabe solo por

conversación” (he had not read it and only knew it by

conversation) with an ephemeral black Spaniard that Aponte met in

port but whose name he could not remember (Franco

2010[1977]:113). Aponte’s performance during the examination

itself forms a demonstration of the tactics and strategies culled

forth by the relations of power on the part of Africans and Afro-

descendents making up the repertoire of Blackness. His

prevaricative responses will be analyzed more fully below, but

first the translation of Africanity into Blackness requires more

fleshing out. What exactly is meant by the usage of these dual,

seemingly-overlapping terms of analysis, and how does Aponte’s

libro evidence both?

Scholars analyzing the libro de pinturas have identified

themes of afrocentricity in his representations of Egypt and

Nubia/Abyssinia/Ethiopia (Fischer 2004; Hernandez 2010).2

2Ethiopia comes from the Greek Αἰθιοπία and refered to all lands south of Egypt. This definition carried over to the Latin Aetheopia from which the English name derives. Abyssinia is a historic name in English for Ethiopia resulting from the Arabic word Habesh, a demonym for the country's

Padilioni 15

Afrocentricity (Asante 2003) refers to an orientational focus that

holds the people and cultures of Africa as central to the history

of the continent, not merely as marginal to Europeans.

Afrocentric theories and praxis develops categories of analysis

that maintain the potentiality of Africans to be active agents in

social and cultural processes - an epistemological break from

Eurocentric modes that diminish African agency simply through

their lack of categorical possibilities for making such actions

legible. For Aponte’s part, altogether there exist over twenty

references to these ancient Northeast African kingdoms in the

libro, clear evidence that the history and peoples of Africa had

a prominent place in Aponte’s imagination (Hernandez:LIII).

Beyond this, the Africa that Aponte chose to represent in his

libro was one that was also Catholic, and that not by consequence

of European explorers, but rather, indigenously Catholic.

Christianity arrived in the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia in the

first century A.D.: the story in the book of Acts detailing the

conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch, servant at the court of Queen

inhabitants. Nubia is a geographic term referring to a region along the Nile River stretching from northern Sudan into southern Egypt, and was included under the name Ethiopia throughout classical antiquity.

Padilioni 16

Candace, forms a key moment in the history of the early church.

Beyond this, Christian legend recounts that Matthew, the gospel

writer, travelled to Ethiopia following the resurrection of

Christ and was responsible for converting the Ethiopian royal

family, including the princess who would be later known as Santa

Efigenia. The provenance of ancient African Christianity had long

existed within the collective memory of Africans, Catholics, and

Afro-Catholics, and it is this wellspring of consciousness that

Aponte tapped into to give his libro an African orientation.

Placing the libro within this milieu, Hernandez reminds us that

“ciertamente el ‘libro de pinturas’ de Aponte merece un lugar

privilegiado entre los antecedentes de la negritud y el

panafricanismo” [certainly Aponte’s book of paintings deserves a

privileged place between the antecedents of negritude and pan-

africanism] (Hernandez 2010:LIV).

One pivotal figure for Aponte’s afrocentricity is Santa

Efigenia, the “Black Virgin” whose story descended from

antiquity through Christian apocrypha, a “netherworld of mystery

and official Church confirmation” which nevertheless circulated

within the ambient cultural resources of the Black Atlantic and

Padilioni 17

was available for Aponte to exploit and appropriate as his own

(Sánchez 2012:639). As stated above, Efigenia was converted to

Christianity after the arrival of Matthew, who, according to the

Golden Legend (de Voragine 1260[1995], was received by Queen

Candace’s eunuch from the Book of Acts. After meeting her

husband, King Eggipus, who was in the midst of mourning his

recently-deceased son, Matthew demonstrated his spiritual powers

through a series of tests that resulted in Eggipus and Candace

building for Matthew a small church that became the basis of his

conversion ministry.3 Efigenia, Eggipus and Candace’s daughter,

dedicated her life to the Church by taking a vow of virginity and

founding a proto-order that housed nearly two hundred other

Ethiopian virgins. When Ytarco, Efigenia’s cousin, expressed his

desire to marry her, Matthew opposed the plans and defended

Efigenia’s vow of chastity, a move that resulted in his

martyrdom. The legend continues that Ytarco then set fire to

Efigenia’s convent but the fire miraculously spared it and

instead drifted towards Ytarco’s own castle, due to the spectral

3 The Golden Legend (Latin: Legenda aurea or Legenda sanctorum) is a collection of hagiographies by Jacobus de Voragine that became a late medieval bestseller, compiled around the year 1260.

Padilioni 18

appearance and intervention of Matthew who compelled the fire

with his command (Sánchez 2012:638-42).

The significance of Efigenia to the story of the martyrdom

of Matthew indelibly stamped her memory into the annals of

African Church history, though sublimated. However, it was the

unfoldings of black chattel slavery that gave Efigenia a

prominent place within the Iberian-American Catholic imaginary,

through the actions of Brazilian-born Portuguese Carmelite priest

José Pereira de Santa Anna. His two-volume hagiography, Os dous

atlantes da Ethiopia, printed in Lisbon in 1735 and 1738 respectively,

resurrected the collective memories of Santa Efigenia and San

Elesbaan as tools to aid in the evangelization of enslaved

Africans.4 It was Pereira’s desire to present these figures to

enslaved populations as pillars of the faith that they could

identify with phenotypically and that also could instruct

Hispanicized Africans on Christian piety. Pereira’s hagiographic

literary creativity also refigured Efigenia as a Carmelite, and

it was through the Carmelite order that her cult of devotion

4 Elesbaan, or Kaleb of Axum, was the king of Axum situated in modern day Eritrea and Ethiopia during the sixth century AD, and became famous in Christian legends for waging battle with and eventually routing out King Dunaan (Dhu Nuwas) , a persecutor of Christians on the Arabian Peninsula.

Padilioni 19

reached the New World. Within two years of the publication of

Pereira’s book, a confraternity, or a lay association of ethnic

Africans dedicated to mutual aid and the assimilation of enslaved

Africans into Hispanic Catholic culture, was founded in Rio de

Janeiro, Brasil, and from thence her veneration spread like

wildfire throughout Iberia America. Indeed, Aponte was conscious

of Pereira’s instrumental role in the development of the Afro-

Atlantic Catholic imagination; plate thirty-seven detailing the

development of “la lengua Latina en Avicinia” (the Latin language

in Abysinnia) also included a representation of “el Padre Pereira

Carmelita,” though no explanation to his specific significance

was asked of Aponte by Nerey (Franco 2010[1977]:114).

Aponte dedicated plates forty-four and forty-five to

recounting the legend of Matthew and Efigenia directly, in a

tableau-type rendering that figured "San Mateo...conviertiendo

dos negros," (Saint Matthew converting two blacks) before

changing scenes to "el palacio del Rey Egipo padre de Sta.

Efigenia" (the palace of King Eggipus father of Sta. Efigenia).

Aponte continued his visual narration of this important moment in

early Church history by detailing the "varias monjas morenas"

Padilioni 20

(various black nuns) in both the church built for Matthew and

Efigenia’s “pequeño convento” (small convent) in which they

lived. The focus of Aponte’s tableau was the scene "[m]as arriba

[donde] se advierte a Ytarco primo de Sta. Efigenia que quiso

casar con ella: pero haviendose [sic] opuesto San Mateo lo mató ó

intentó matar Ytarco á puñaladas” (above [where] is noted Ytarco,

cousin of Sta. Efigenia that wanted to marry her: but having been

opposed by St. Matthew, Ytarco killed him or tried to kill him by

stabbing). The centrality of Efigenia and the Ethiopian royal

family to the martyrdom of Matthew, and therefore the development

of Christianity in the first decades after the death,

resurrection, and ascension of Christ, was a history fully

conscious to Aponte, and one that he wished to give visual

realization to in his libro (Franco 2010[1977]:117).

Yet another striking example of Aponte’s afrocentricity came

with the depiction of Preste Juan, a mythical Christian king and

priest of the medieval European imagination that was believed to

have lived in either India. For centuries, European dreamers and

explorers elaborated upon the legend of Preste Juan, scouring the

East to find his legendary kingdom. With the arrival of the

Padilioni 21

Portuguese first in Africa during the late fourteenth century,

Ethiopia replaced India as the reputed home of Preste Juan’s

Christian kingdom (Bar-Ilan 1994). It is this longstanding trope

that Aponte seized upon to give his Afrocentric cosmovision

further legitimacy. Nerey honed in upon a battle scene in plate

seven that included “cavesas [sic] blancas una lebantada [sic]

por un moreno y otro en la mano” (white heads, one raised by a

black man and the other in his hand), the second of which was

“arrojando sangre” (spewing blood) onto the ground (Franco

2010[1977]: 98-100). Here we see Aponte’s use of doubling once

again, as this imagery, obviously disturbing and incendiary to

the stability of a White Spanish slavocracy, conjured up memories

of the Haitian Revolution. However, Aponte told Nerey that this

battle scene depicted the “Guerra Recomvenio” waged by the

righteous Preste Juan, and that the flag appearing in the

painting was that of “Avicinia.” Adding yet more layers of

doubled and contested meaning to Aponte’s inclusion of Preste

Juan to his libro was the addition of a bronze statue “sin

abrazos” (without arms), evidently referencing Lady Justice, that

he placed alongside Preste Juan in plates sixteen and seventeen

Padilioni 22

"imbocando la divina misericordia" (invoking divine

mercy/compassion). The Afrocentric rendering of Preste Juan in

Aponte’s libro does more than merely situate the agency of

African peoples as central to their history, but goes further and

places Europeans (the two disembodied white heads) as marginal,

disposable, and all this under the protection of divine justice.

“I’m (Radically) Black, but Beautiful...”

Aponte’s libro indicates a clear awareness of Africa in the

ordering and structuring of his consciousness, but this alone is

not Blackness. However, the pivot between Afrocentricity and

Blackness is the harnessing and mobilization of such collective

memories for some distinct political purpose. The inclusion of

themes of divine justice alongside the imagery of White soldiers

being slain by an African king is a statement of political

theology, a rendering of authority and power that appeals to a

higher claim than that of men, and one that inverted the social

hierarchy of Spanish colonialism in Cuba. It is important to note

that blackness as subjectivity results not from the color of

one’s skin directly, but rather from the behaviors, dispositions,

Padilioni 23

modalities of being, and survival tactics that a White

pigmentocracy culls out and develops in the personhood that just

so happens to be embodied in black skin. As James Cone averred,

“[b]eing black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and

your body are where the dispossessed are” (1969:151). This

dispossession at the heart of blackness - the stolen life

resulting from the purely economic valuation of the black body as

object within the logics of slavery - is a “nothingness”

rendering black personhood invisible. Though the power structures

of slavery attempted to negate black bodies, the reality remained

that black bodies are human and are animated by consciousness.

Consciousness, ever ethereal and immaterial, can not easily be

shackled, but rather the “richness of the imagination” is

governed, in Kantian terminology, by a "lawless freedom” that in

the case of Aponte proved both self-liberatory and dangerous to

the external imposition of order and regulation. “The history of

blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do

resist” (Moten 2003:1).

The most vivid material instantiation of Aponte’s animating

consciousness is the painting of the Virgen negra de Regla in

Padilioni 24

plate forty-five and forty-six. This “más espectacular” image

forms, for Hernandez, a crucial site for excavating the black

political theology in “la constelación de signos conjurada por

Aponte (the constellation of signs conjured by Aponte)

(2010:LVIII). The central focus of this image was the Virgen

negra de Regla, one of the many advocations of Mary whose

provenance hails from North Africa. According to tradition, the

original statue of Regla, depicted with black skin, was created

by St. Augustine of Hippo, and subsequently taken to Chipiona in

southern Spain (Oleszkiewicz-Peralba 2007:123). From this

location, the cult of Regla moved into the New World, as her

statue arrived in Cuba in 1714 to be erected in a church built in

her honor. Alcalde Pedro de Aranda declared La Virgen de Regla as

patrona of the Bay of Habana. As such, her iconography - a

triangular-shaped figure dressed in an oceanic blue robe, holding

a White Christchild in her black arms - was no stranger to the

world of 1812 Habana in which Aponte lived and which supplied him

with source materials for his libro.

In Aponte’s rendering, Regla stands on top of a pedestal

with a personification of Faith at her feet. Also at her feet was

Padilioni 25

Moses, San Manuel,5 and San Benito de Palermo. For his part, San

Benito’s significance lie in his biography: he was born the son

of Cristoforo and Diana Manasseri, enslaved Africans in Sicily in

1526. After being granted freedom at birth or sometime in his

childhood, Benito joined a group of hermits living in the

mountains outside of Palermo that was loosely associated with the

Franciscan order. After twenty-six years of hermitage that

included Benito’s election as the group’s superior, this group of

lay monks were forced by papal decree to formally enter the

leadership structure of the Church, where Benito was demoted from

superior to cook. Nevertheless, Benito’s piety and the fame of

his miracles and healings increased throughout his community.

Upon his death in 1589, his cult of devotion emerged almost

immediately, and most fervently among enslaved populations. The

enslaved community of Sicily crafted icons and images of Benito

depicted with a halo or corona around his head before the Church

“officially” gave permission for a mortal to be honored such,

pushing the hand of the Sicilian Inquisition to make an exception

lest the enslaved populations express displeasure at having their

5 This might refer to San Manuel, Persian martyr, or Emmanuel, one of the OldTestament prefigurings of Jesus, as translated by Stephane Palmié (2002:123).

Padilioni 26

veneration of Benito curtailed. Benito’s cult veneration

travelled from Sicily to the Iberian peninsula through the effort

of Palermo merchant Giovan Domenico Rubbiano who wrote to the

king of Spain in 1607 of the growing Sicilian devotion to Benito

and the potential this represented for New World evangelization

efforts. With the Spanish crown’s attentions thus piqued,

Benito’s relics were moved from Sicily to Iberia, where they

catalyzed devotion and syncretization with the indigenous

practices of enslaved Africans within the institutional structure

of the confraternities formed in Benito’s memory in Spain and

Portugal during the seventeenth century (Fiume 2006:29-30). His

devotio growing rapidly, three senators from Palermo expressed

surprise at encountering a large crowd of Africans processing

Benito’s statue in Lisbon in 1619 (Fiume 2006; Dell’Aira

2009:285).

Benito’s phenotypical appearance signified a certain

subjectivity, crafted and born out of a common imposition of

slavery uniting the diffusion of Diasporan experiences, that

resonated with Afro-Catholics in Ibero-America and led to the

development of a very specific cult of devotion predominantly

Padilioni 27

catalyzed by enslaved Africans in the New World . Through the

efforts of the Franciscan order, the first African confraternity

on record formed in Benito’s memory dates from Lisbon in 1609;

three years later, Rio de Janeiro would mark the first New World

appearance of a Benito confraternity, which included the building

an altar dedicated to the Afro-Sicilian friar in the church of

the Lady of the Rosary. A second Brazilian confraternity to São

Benedito (in the Portuguese rendering of his hagionym) emerged in

Salvador da Bahia in 1630 (Dell'Aira 2009:285-86). After some

interruptions, the process of Benito’s canonization took on full

steam in 1713, spurred by the proliferation of his veneration

among enslaved populations in the Americas, which had spread from

Brazil into Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela (Fiume 2006:16).

Dell’Aira noted that the New World cult of Benito developed

"autonomously from that in Sicily" and in an "inversely

proportional speed to the reduction of his fame in the

Mediterranean” (2009:294). The fast and deep devotion of Benito

in Ibero-America is best revealed by the recollections of Paolino

de Velasco, the son of slaves born in Lima who testified before

the Vatican in 1716 that "[a]s a small child I used to go

Padilioni 28

willingly to that church to see the image of the said servant of

God, whom I liked to see because he was black like me" (Fiume

2006:19).

Canonized officially as the patron saint of New World

Africans in 1807, San Benito’s iconography would have been in an

upsurge during the time period Aponte created his libro,

circulating through the proliferation of devotional images

characterizing both Spanish New World evangelization and the

Church’s counterreformation strategy (Lepage 2013). Positioning

this saint, sometimes ethnically-denoted in hagionym as “el

Moro,” at the feet of Regla set off a chain of signification that

evinced a type of Catholic black pride/piety. However, Aponte’s

averment of a radical blackness was indexed by more than just the

complexion of Regla and Benito’s skin. Appearing underneath

Regla’s pedestal, Aponte wrote the Latin phrase nigra suns (sic), a

detail immediately seized upon for further questioning by Nerey.

What was so significant about this phrase, and what fears did it

trigger for Nerey and the Cuban colonial government by extension?

The phrase nigra sum (misspelled by Aponte as suns) is a

shortened version of the longer phrase nigra sum sed formosa which

Padilioni 29

translates “I am black but beautiful” and appears in the Old

Testament book Canticum Canticorum, also known as the Song of

Solomon. In this book, the beloved maiden makes the above

statement, and throughout medieval Europe this section of

Scripture was interpreted as an allusion to the Virgin Mary, so

much so that this interpretation of nigra sum sed formosa forms the

ground for the inclusion of the phrase in the liturgy of Vespers,

one of the canonical hours associated with the Virgin.6 Scholars

studying the phenomena of black madonnas have identified over 450

such dating from the Medieval period scattered throughout the

European continent, and inscribing the bases of black madonna

statues with this phrase was a long-established practice in

Europe prior to Aponte’s continuation of this tradition in his

libro (Begg 1996; Birnbaum 2000; Sheer 2002; Oleszkiewicz-Peralba

2007). What Aponte did was neither novel nor suspicious under

normal circumstances, but in the context of his libro, filtered

through his Afrocentric consciousness, the connotation of such a

6 This common Vespers text has been arranged by many composers including 16thc. Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi and 16th c. Spanish composer Tomás Luisde Victoria, among others.

Padilioni 30

declaration of pride in blackness formed a potent critique

against the slave order’s devaluation of black bodies.

Nerey, for reasons that we could only speculate as to why,

asked Aponte whose hand wrote the inscription, to which Aponte

replied that “no entiende latin" (he did not understand Latin)

but that he had taken the words nigra suns from "un librito de

alabanzas a Maria SSma. entendiendo que significan ser negra,

pero la mas hermosa” (a little book of praises to the most holy

Mary understanding that they mean to be black, but the most

beautiful) (Franco 2010[1977]:118). Aponte’s three-part answer --

first a disavowal of Latin literacy, then his explanation that he

merely copied the phrase from a book (an activity that could

equally be credited to Aponte’s skills as an artist and not his

reading comprehension) followed by his paraphrased, not direct

translation seems more than merely evasive. Once again, we turn

to Gundaker, whose idea of not-reading (1998) seems a useful way to

understand the dynamics at work in Aponte’s testimony. With

island-wide literacy rates in Cuba prior to 1820 estimated at

only between 10 to 12 percent (Franklin 2012:17), one could

imagine that public demonstrations of literacy would mark the

Padilioni 31

literate person as possessing a greatly-desired skill within his

society. We know that Aponte as a free moreno was literate in

Spanish, as his testimony refers to several books he read as

sources for his paintings, including the librito of alabanzas

that contained the Latin phrase under question. Beyond this,

eleven books were found by authorities in his personal library,

including such literary classics such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote

(Palmié 2002:108).

Despite the obvious personal pleasure and status that Aponte

could have derived from his reading literacy, Gundaker reminds us

that some blacks "approach[ed] reading and writing ambiguously

and double-voicedly,” in a dynamic process of interaction that

"contrast[ed] appropriate occasions for using conventional

literacy with important occasions in which conventional literacy

is not appropriate and vernacular priorities predominate,”

situations often constellating around religious themes and

experiences (1998:99, 105). Let’s return to Nerey’s question once

more: “de qué mano está escrita la inscripción del libro...[que]

empieza nigra suns?” (of what hand is written the inscription of

the book that begins nigra suns). Here, Nerey asks Aponte a

Padilioni 32

direct question about who produced the Roman scripted phrase on

Regla’s pedestal, yet instead of answering that specific

question, Aponte instead redirected, by explicitly denying

literacy and indicating to the court that he did not understand

Latin. Only after putting on record his lack of Latin literacy

did Aponte then tell Nerey that he saw with his eyes the Roman

script letters that spelled out the phrase, however when he

provided his interpretation, he offered a paraphrased translation

that it meant “to be black but the most beautiful” as opposed to

the direct, personally subjected “I am black but beautiful.”

Was Aponte telling the full truth or a half truth, or

perhaps a multivoiced, purposefully ambiguous statement in which

“truth” as a negating concept is not even applicable? Is it

possible that he truly did not know the exact Latin meaning, but

included it in his artfully-assembled libro based upon its

provenance and relation to European black madonnas generally?

Pushing the historical record to settle upon a definitive answer

is impossible, so we must content ourselves, as did Nerey, with

letting Aponte’s duplicitous answer suffice. But this exchange

seems to exemplify Gundaker’s assertion that “[l]iteracy makes a

Padilioni 33

worthy foil for different personal and cultural priorities

precisely because it is so important, and so difficult to

attain.” Aponte shifted away from direct conventional literacy,

characteristic of conventional or European literate values, into

a more fluid interpretive position; away from static textuality

towards a creative performative moment, an African or black oral

orientation, and he created unique, paraphrased meaning by

“signifying… on other authors intertextually, and on aspects of

European literary tradition that are alien to [his] experience"

(1998:105-106). Aponte’s performance before Nerey, and his

double-voiced ambiguous answers to direct questions is animated

by the dynamic of the "tension between reading and not-reading”

characterizing “narratives as well as other African American

expressive images and practices.” This moment of the Aponte trial

follows Gundaker’s assertion that “not-reading is itself a

vernacular African American expressive 'tradition,’” that

embraces multiplicity and “coexisting difference, a cosmological

break-pattern that cuts across literacy, not devaluing reading,

writing, or alphabetic script but momentarily illuminating and

provisionally displacing them” (1998:119-121).

Padilioni 34

The Virgen de Regla’s significance to Afro-Cubans exceeds

the dimensions of her skin color. At some point in the history of

African peoples in Cuba, the iconography and symbolism of Regla

syncretized with that of Yemayá, the Yoruban mother oricha/deity

whose name is a contraction for the Yoruban phrase yeye emo eja

meaning “mother whose children are like fish.” The Cuban case of

Yoruban-Catholic cosmological syncretism resulting in the

religious networks known as Regla de Ocha, Lucumí, or more

popularly as Santería, is well-documented by scholars for the

creativity and ingenuity displayed by diverse West African ethnic

groups as they reassembled the dislocated datum of their home

cultures with implements of Cuban Catholicism forced upon them by

the experience of slavery (Brown 2003; Otero & Falola 2013). As

Cuba transformed from a small colonial outpost into the center of

both Spanish and Caribbean sugar production from the latter part

of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century (Knight 1974:204),

the rapid increase of enslaved African arrivals created a

situation in which African ethnic identity and cultural patterns

remained strong, particularly through the institutions of cabildos

de nacion which functioned in similar fashion to the

Padilioni 35

confraternities but were ethnic associations independent of

Church authority (Childs 2006:104).

Aponte, The Theologian of the Bahía de La Habana

The figure of Aponte appears in close proximity to the

Lucumí religious practices and the cabildos that enabled and

fostered the development of the Yoruban-Catholic syncretism,

though scholars have disagreed to his exact involvement.

Hernandez, following Franco, asserts that Aponte held a position

of leadership in the cabildo Shangó Tedum (also known as cabildo

de Santa Barbara ) (2010:XIV).7 Franco believed that Aponte was a

priest in the Lucumi writing, “la dirección del cabildo Shangó

Tedum daba a José Antonio Aponte una especial superioridad en la

masa popular de color de La Habana. Por su origen era un ogboni,

es decir, miembro de la más poderosa de las sociedades secretas

de Nigeria, y, también, en el orden religioso Lucumí tenía la

categoría de un Oni-Shangó” (The direction of the cabildo gave

7 Shangó is the name of another Yoruban oricha very popular in the pantheon of Afro-Cuban spirituality who became syncretized and represented by the iconography of Santa Barbara.

Padilioni 36

José Antonio Aponte a special status among the popular mass of

color of Havana. By origin he was ogboni, that is to say, a

member of the most powerful of secret societies in Nigeria, and

also, in the religious order Lucumí he had the category of an

Oni-Shangó) (2010[1977]:25). While Stephane Palmié disturbs this

interpretation by pointing out that Franco’s assertions come “on

the basis of anything but documentary evidence,” (Franco relied

upon material culture and oral histories here), there is evidence

that definitely indicates Aponte’s associates Clemente Chacón and

Salvador Ternero - also arrested during the March raid that

recovered the libro de pinturas - were Lucumí practitioners

(2002:90).

All this is to say that Aponte certainly had a consciousness

of Lucumí and the signifiance of the Virgen de Regla/Yemayá

pairing. This pairing that recognized Regla and Yemayá as not

reducible to each other or placed in a binary opposition but

rather form two fractal parts of a whole is a hallmark of the

African Diasporan semiosphere, in which “[s]uch signs are not so

much hidden as masked from outsider view by being at once

ordinary to the point of invisibility and subject to multiple

Padilioni 37

interpretation” (Gundaker 1998:114). Again, we have the

materiality of Aponte’s libro evidencing the Afrocentric

orientation of the consciousness that produced it, but what moves

the plate representation of the Virgen de Regla into the realm of

a radical black political theology is the reappearance of a

symbol from the Preste Juan plate. “[A]cia (sic) la derecha está

una columna y sobre ella una figura sin brazos y es la estatua de

Nebrión representando la Justicia qe. no debe tenerlos pa. no

recivir nada con ellos" (towards the right is a column and on it

a figure without arms and it is the statue of Nebrion

representing Justice that must not have them [arms] in order to

not receive anything with them) (Franco 2010[1977]:118). With the

inclusion of Lady Justice to the right of Regla, this beautiful

black virgin, with the worshipping figure of San Benito at her

feet, Aponte visually argues that sovereignty lies above the

Cuban colonial government, the Spanish monarchy, and that in the

heart of all this divine justice is a black soul. This reading of

Aponte’s libro follows Copeland’s insistence that “[i]f we

consider black theology as comprehensive critical reflection on

the human condition, how could it not be political!” (2006:271).

Padilioni 38

Aponte’s theology and theorization is practical and

artifactual. He created his black political theology by and

through painting, he went “to school by listening to the

vernacular” and thus can be placed within the tradition of black

political theology that “esteems ordinary people's critical

consciousness of their own predicament” (Copeland 2006:271).

Hernandez finds in the figures of Preste Juan (an earthly king)

and Regla (a celestial queen) an “ordenamiento” (arrangement)

that manages at once to resonate and articulate with contemporary

debates of absolute monarchy circulating the Atlantic littoral

since the fall of the ancien régime during the French Revolution,

the crisis of the Bourbon monarchy following the 1808 invasion of

Spain by Napoléon, the overthrow of the slave system and French

colonial administration with the installment of the Empire of

Haiti in 1804, and the outbreak of juntas and coups associated

with Bolívarian revolutions and wars for independence raging Ibero-

America beginning in 1809 Quito (2010:LIX- LX). Aponte’s keen

attention to an “African heritage, historic traditions of

resistance, and pan-African orientation,” coupled with his

libro’s eschatological cosmovision helped “explain the difference

Padilioni 39

between the political as the legitimate use of authorized power

and its vulgar reduction to predatory, acquisitive contrivance”

(Copeland 2006:273,272). Indeed, the libro was not just for his

personal pleasure, but served as an communal epistemic site, as

he had shown the libro to others in his barrio, including members

of the black militias that had fought in Haiti alongside the

Spanish against the British, and it was rumors of its existence

that first prompted authorities to go in search of it (Palmié

2002:99; Childs 2006:4).

Aponte’s libro, as a codex of Africanity enunciating a

radical black politics presented Nerey and other Cuban

authorities with “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges” that required

the restatement of Spanish sovereignty on their part (Foucault

1980:81). After two weeks of ambiguous and circular responses

from Aponte, his trial was suspended without resolution. On the

morning of 9 April 1812, Aponte was taken from his cell at La

Cabaña Fortress and executed along with eight other alleged co-

conspirators. Aponte was decapitated and his hands removed in

order to place them on the road leading to his barrio as a

Padilioni 40

deterrent and reminder to any other would-be insurrectionists

that the Spanish Crown’s authority in Cuba remained sovereign.

“Por razones de historia…”

How shall we contextualize the happenings constellating

around the figure of Aponte in the spring of 1812? With so much

of his story submerged in an oceanic silence, is there anyway

that historical scholarship can dredge up his memory and enable

Aponte to speak (Spivak 1988)? As noted in the introduction of

this essay, everything we know about Aponte comes to us already

mediated through the records of his trial that were “created and

preserved by the same machinery of power and knowledge production

that annihilated Aponte.” Though structured so, scholars are left

no other recourse but to contend with the occluded aurality of

the archival record, the only “medium through which his ghostly

voice -- warped and distorted...by the noise of multiple

interferences” can speak to us across timepsace (Palmié 2002:83).

But the case of Aponte and the entire history of the African

Diaspora presents a thorny challenge to the methodology of

history and its categories of analysis that historians use as a

grid of legibility for viewing and reading the past. Lest we

Padilioni 41

naively assume that history as a discipline arose in a power-

neutral space, the scholar of African Diasporan history must

center in her mind the unpleasant fact that history as a

discursive formation of modernity operates upon the same logical

basis that buttressed and gave form to black chattel slavery.

History, on the surface, seems like a benign method of

recording and counting the passage of human events in time. But

the reality is that, in the Western world since the

Enlightenment, the keeping of time and the significance afforded

to events and happenings that occur within time has been a highly

structured and specific cultural endeavor. Despite the

Enlightenment’s claims to universality - of truth, heuristics

explaining the nature of humanity, the passage of time, among

others - scholars working with populations and cultures outside

of the European tradition "must protest even more loudly that its

universal is so peculiar and that its global is so local" (Taiwo

1998:4). One sees the germination of such universalist thinking

in G.F.W. Hegel’s Philosophy of History, a series of lectures he gave

during the 1820s. The herald Introduction speaks with the unified

voice of the ages in its first sentence:

Padilioni 42

The subject of this course of Lectures is the Philosophical History of the World.

And by this must be understood, not a collection of general observations

respecting it, suggested by the study of its records, and proposed to be illustrated

by its facts, but Universal History (1956[1837]:1).

Hegel views the world from the position of the cosmos and with an

authority that grants him omniscience in the affairs of men. For

his part, he believed that history moved “from east to west” with

its fullest flowering and termination being found in Europe.

History for Hegel "is none other than the progress of the

consciousness of Freedom.” A progression that resulted from the

subordination of passion and intuition, a freedom that achieves

fullest expression only within and through the faculty of

rationality, owing to the fact that “Reason is the Sovereign of

the World” (1956[1837]:19, 9).

When Hegel addressed Africa, he did so by subdividing the

continent into three parts: 1) Africa south of the Sahara, 2) the

Mediterranean coastal sections of Africa which he explained was

“to be attached to Europe,” and 3) the Nile River Valley, home to

Egypt and Ethiopia, which Hegel took care to point out was “in

connection with Asia.” Hegel’s jagged geography, and his

Padilioni 43

annexation of portions of Africa to Asia and Europe was clearly a

move to salvage his universal theory, lest the existence of

storied civilizations on the African continent disturb his tidy

formulation for the progression of history towards its

rationalized and free end in Europe: Enlightenment

(1956[1837]:91). With Africa so divided, Hegel could then

pronounce that south of the Sahara, the continent was "enveloped

in the dark mantle of Night." A "darkness" so blinding and

impenetrable to his myopic Eurocentric sight that it rendered

"the peculiarly African character...difficult to comprehend," a

situation that forced him to "give up the principle which

naturally accompanies all our ideas -- the category of

Universality." This is a crucial point that must not be glossed

over too fast. If history is a universal progression of a

universal consciousness that rationalizes itself toward freedom,

and African peoples sit outside of universality, then by that

premise Africa sits outside of history, and outside of the

universal rationalized consciousness that animates the nature of

humanity. Analytic categories such as agency and the linear

conception of change over time, so fetishized within

Padilioni 44

historiography, are categories that implicitly cannot account for

African peoples and cultures.

Taiwo offers a simple explanation for the Hegelian

historical project, namely, that "pedigree arguments always serve

an imperialist purpose" (1998:10). Lacking the rationality

necessary to develop the African consciousness, Hegel believed

that “Negroes...are capable of no development or culture, and as

we see them at this day, such have they always been. The only

essential connection that has existed and continued between the

Negroes and the Europeans is that of slavery..." (1956[1837]:93).

It is not necessary that I personally respond to this bold

assertion, as Aponte’s libro forms its own critique merely by the

fact that it existed. The annals of Ethiopian, Nubian, Abyssinian

and Egyptian history presented by Aponte, his rendering of Preste

Juan’s killing of Whites in battle, the black Virgen de Regla who

celebrates the aesthetics of her pigmentation, the divine, blind

justice that underwrote it all - all of this muddies the clean

divisions of historical epoch and geography so necessary to

Hegel’s formulations. Indeed, Aponte told Nerey that he included

the specific set of images in his libro "por razón de Historia

Padilioni 45

como todo lo demás del libro” (for reason of history like everything

else in the book, emphasis added) (Franco 2010[1977]:117).

Clearly, Aponte’s theory and philosophy of history departed from

that of Hegel, but unfortunately for Aponte and his fellow

African and African-descended peoples, “the ghost of Hegel

dominates the hallways, institutions, syllabi, instructional

practices, and journals of Euro-American philosophy” (Taiwo

1998:5). To use academic historical methodology to uncover the

history of Aponte would be to silence him once again with the

very same logic of slavery and black bodily subjugation that

decapitated his head and placed it upon a pike.

The Enlightenment and subsequent Age of Revolution

represents the coming together and the overflowing of several

diverse streams of peoples, cultures, philosophies, and tensions

spanning the globe, many of which collided in the area of the

Caribbean. Though outside of Europe geographically and

analytically/categorically, “Caribbean people of African descent,

both free and enslaved” must be placed “at the heart...of the

political and intellectual transformations of the age” (Dubois

2004:28). No better example of this need to reformulate

Padilioni 46

historical orientation can be found than the Haitian Revolution,

an event that blindsided the European imagination and continues

to sit outside of the Western world’s cognitive apparatus.

Haitian scholar Rolph Trouillot brilliantly described the

situation:

The Haitian Revolution thus entered history with the peculiar characteristic of

being unthinkable even as it happened. Publications of the times, including the long list of pamphlets on Saint Domingue published in France from 1790 to 1804, reveal the incapacity of most contemporaries to understand the ongoing Revolution on its own terms. They could read the news only with their ready-made categories, and these categories were incompatible withthe idea of a slave revolution….If some events cannot be accepted even as they occur, how can they be assessed later? In other words, can historical narratives convey plots that are unthinkable in the world within which these narratives take place? How does one write a history of the impossible” (1995:73)

The “impossible history” that was the 1791 Haitian slave uprising

and subsequent liberation is Aponte’s libro de pinturas. One

senses the desperation of Nerey and the Cuban colonial

administration in trying to find a source for the slave

rebellions of 1812, the ur-text that opened enslaved Cubans’

consciousness of freedom in order to prevent being blindsided in

the same way France was by Haiti. What underground currents of

Padilioni 47

information were circulating among the enslaved populations of

the Caribbean that moved their actions from timeless into “world-

historical” significance?

Even if we give credit to the Enlightenment’s rhetoric about

the natural rights of man and liberty as catalyzing an animating

consciousness among Afro-Caribbeans, we once again fall into the

Hegelian trap. Susan Buck-Morss (2009) argues that it was the

Haitian Revolution with its sudden burst of African agency that

Hegel used as the metaframe for the development of his master-

slave dialectic, the process by which history is made, published

in The Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807. According to this formulation,

the Haitian Revolution represents the development of a

consciousness of freedom in African peoples as a result of the

interaction with European slave masters, formula that produced

such historical works such as C. L. R. James' The Black Jacobins

(1989). Buck-Morss herself gets dangerously close to falling into

the Hegelian trap, reading in Trouillot “a danger in conflating"

the present-day silence in scholarship regarding Haiti with

eighteenth-century reckonings with the slave

rebellion.“Eighteenth century Europeans” she writes, contra

Padilioni 48

Trouillot’s assertion, “were thinking about the Haitian Revolution

precisely because it challenged the racism of many of their

preconceptions" since the spirit of liberty "could be catching,

crossing the line" between races, indicating that “the desire for

freedom was universal” and an “event of world history”

(2009;50,51).

But while this might seem self-evident and affirming of

African humanity, in fact, thinking that the Enlightenment

radicalized Afro-Haitians (and Afro-Cubans like Aponte by

extension) actually underscores and confirms the original

Hegelian formulation. Indirectly, this line of argumentation

claims that black chattel slavery worked to pull African peoples

out of the darkness of primordial time and into the back of the

line of humanity moving towards rationality and freedom, for it

is only within the slave position of the dialectic that Geist can

begin to know itself, develop and expand. Thus, the white man was

a necessary imposition against which African consciousness can be

activated into joining the march towards enlightenment with the

rest of the world’s peoples.

Padilioni 49

The depth of Eurocentric analytical categories and the

strictures that frame any attempt at viewing the past within the

paradigm of historical scholarship requires the creation of

entirely new paradigms and modes of analysis. To this end, Fred

Moten supplies radical blackness - not as an essential characteristic

of the skin but as a tradition “in apposition to enlightenment.”

Not oppositional, and therefore locked into the dialectic of

binaries, but appositional, or existing in some orientation or

relation off to the side of the Enlightenment, anywhere that can

paint for the mind’s eye the ontological wholeness of the black

radical tradition. (2004:274). Aponte’s libro criss-crosses

between the Enlightenment and the black radical tradition,

weaving them together in spots, but never privileging the

European crowning terminus of Hegelian history. Aponte’s history,

“in the sense of the legitimacy or even power that the past can

bestow on the present,” articulates with European history, but

exists in its own uniquely black timespace.

Aponte’s larger ontology is furnished by his turn to the

cosmological and religious as the seat of ultimate sovereignty.

Aponte’s magnificent painting that appealed to black Mary as the

Padilioni 50

just Queen of Heaven was a reframing of the Enlightenment’s

theorization of freedom. What Aponte did was something different,

not an acculturation or embrace of the Enlightenment whole cloth

from within it, but a creative improvisation played upon the

Enlightenment from the outside. Scholars of the African Diaspora

must keep this premise central to their investigations, for to

“confuse the protest of black or African or African-descended

persons against denials of their humanity - dehumanization - as

Enlightenment inspired, liberal self-assertion is to miss the

radical and dangerous nature of that protest” (Copeland

2006:277). Moten explains that “[t]here is an enduring politico-

economic and philosophical moment with which the black radical

tradition is engaged. That moment is called the Enlightenment.

This tradition is concerned with the opening of a new

Enlightenment, one made possible by the ongoing improvisation of

a given Enlightenment" (2004:275). The creativity of the libro de

pinturas, its multivoiced, doubled meanings, Aponte’s non-reading

and evasion of literacy’s Eurocentric value, his rhizomatic

assemblage of deterritorializing and reterritorializing (false

divisions between African and European knowledges) symbols and

Padilioni 51

iconography (Deleuze & Guattari 1987[1980]) - all these reveal

the animating black consciousness at the heart of his artistic

project and pushing him to “the verge of devising a comprehensive

theory about what was happening around him” (Palmié 2002:126).

This paper has attempted to remove the analytic framing of

Eurocentric models of history from our view of Aponte’s libro de

pinturas. Instead of looking through the imposition of this

frame, I have instead tried to observe the "fugitive movement in

and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social

logic" to locate an intuition of freedom immanent to a radical

black consciousness, one not dependent upon the Enlightenment to

supply it with the theorization needed for self-liberation. The

"movement of escape,” for radical black consciousness slips

beyond the grasp of European categories of agency and progress to

capture and make intelligible. The free flowing fluidity of an

imagination that cannot be hemmed in or curtailed “is stolen

life” (Moten 2008:179). Black life that flourishes and is social

and is stolen away from the structuring containment of European

analytical vision, within the “absolute nothingness” that is the

void of the European cognitive filter; Blackness as "the place

Padilioni 52

that has no place" (Moten 2013:751). Aponte’s libro de pinturas

gave visual form to the fugitive movements of radical, Black

politico-theological consciousness, and though his body was

crushed under the machinic sovereignty of the Spanish state, his

consciousness - the collective consciousness of the African

Diaspora - has always already been liberated.

Padilioni 53

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