On Blackness and Belonging in Contemporary Spain: Desirée Bela-Lobedde’s Ser mujer negra en España

Abstract

Few studies have addressed how Spanish nationals who are racialized as Black challenge essentialist and ethnic notions of Spanish identity and create spaces of enunciation from which to tell their stories as minorities in a majority culture. This essay contends that Desirée Bela-Lobedde’s 2018 autobiographical narrative Ser mujer negra en España creates such a space by advocating for Black Spanish female lived experience as a maker of meaning and identity. I draw on Michelle M. Wright’s conceptualization of Blackness as an identity construction and as phenomenological to make a case for a nuanced definition of Spanish Blackness that specifies its diversity and is inclusive of its historical materiality. As the narrative interprets Black Spanish female identity epiphenomenally at specific moments and declares a space for Black female empowerment and agency, at the same time it reveals the epistemic violence of how the Spanish cultural imaginary constructs Blackness as Other and as disconnected from contemporary notions of Spanish identity. The narrative is thus a powerful reflection on strategic forms of resistance and discursively functions to negotiate identity from the margins.