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The African presence in imperial Spain, of between 10-15 per cent of the population, was due to the institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade that brought between seven- to eight hundred thousand Africans as slaves to Spain and Portugal. If we add those slaves born in these European territories and the three to four hundred thousand Moor, Berber and Turk slaves, there were approximately two million slaves living in the Iberian Peninsula during this period. The Afro-Hispanic proverb ‘Black but Human’ that provides part of the book’s title, serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which certain visual representations of slavery both embody and reproduce hegemonic visions of subaltern groups, and at the same time provide material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves themselves. It thus allows us to generate critical insights into the articulations of slave subjectivity by exploring the links between visual regimes and the early modern Spanish and New World discourses on slavery and human diversity. My book provides a complex new reading of neglected moments of artistic production in Hapsburg Spain establishing their importance as relays of power and resistance. We could claim that the ‘Black but Human’ topos encodes the multilayered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a ‘black nation’ forges a collective resistance, and the ways in which these moments are articulated visually by a range of artists. Thus, this proverb is the main thread of the six chapters of this book.

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I discuss the shift from an hegemonic view of Afro-Hispanic slaves and ex-slaves to the articulation of the emergence of the slave ‘subject’ and the ‘emancipatory subject’ by concentrating on both; the only extant seventeenth-century portrait of an Afro-Hispanic slave subject, Juan de Pareja (1649) by his master, Diego Velázquez, made before Velázquez emancipated Pareja in Rome (1650), and on the articulation of the freed subject in Pareja’s self-portrait, in his painting The Calling of St Matthew (1661). I deal with how Velázquez’s portrait provides the form by which Pareja fashions his Europeanized self-portrait to signify his freedom and I explore the ways its iconography embodies extant discourses on diversity and slavery: Pareja’s attachment both to the collective Christian African past, and to his present with the experience of black communities, where the ‘Black but Human’ topos emerged. I also provide an account of Pareja’s career as an independent artist.