This chapter aims to tie together many of the themes in the preceding chapters with a four-fold strategy. First, it sets out a general overview of the Iberian economy during the medieval period. This includes an analysis of how and why the economic balance of power shifted from the Islamic to the Christian states during the medieval centuries. Then, it provides a broader picture of some major developments in the peri-Iberian European and Islamic-Mediterranean economies in the medieval period, including micro- and macroeconomic developments. Third, this chapter shows how different regions of Iberia connected with elements of the peri-Iberian economies set out in the previous section; specifically how the Islamic states maintained ties with North Africa and points further afield; how the Christian North and West connected with the northern Atlantic economy; how the south-west eventually built ties with the Atlantic islands, West Africa, and more distant markets; and how the Eastern peninsula maintained ties with various Mediterranean markets. Finally, the chapter ends with some general conclusions, including the idea that, as this volume amply shows, it is high time to dispel any lingering sense of an economic “Black Legend” when discussing the economy of medieval Iberia.

The Epilogue shows how the defamatory stories that began to emerge in the 1930s crystallized after Raúl’s death into an individualized “black legend” about “el negro Raúl.” I demonstrate the patterned and repetitive nature of these stories, which plagiarized each other and echoed master narratives of race rather than reflecting Raúl’s lived experience. The Epilogue brings the story of Raúl’s Black legend up to the present, where the largely unchanged contours of his tale suggest the tensions and incomplete transformations of Argentina’s newfound multiculturalism, and the ongoing seductiveness of “black legend” stories even within the emergent Black movement. Finally, I discuss the challenges (archival and conceptual) of researching Raúl’s story in a country that denies its African heritage, and I reflect on how the interest it sparked among my fellow Argentines suggests that Black Legend may, after all, help shift the narratives on Blackness in Argentina and beyond.

I introduce readers to Raúl Grigera, to master narratives of race (Whiteness and Blackness) in Argentina, and to the hundreds of defamatory stories by which Raúl came to be known and remembered. I use this corpus to sketch the composite story of his life that the book goes on to debunk and rewrite: his supposedly unknowable or inexplicable origins, his early orphandom and wayward youth, his spurious fame as a buffoon of the city’s elite, his oft-anticipated decline and death. Engaging with literature in psychology, critical race studies, literary theory, and other fields to explore narrative’s singularly persuasive power, the introduction develops the concept of “racial stories” and makes the case for the urgency of crafting new, critical counter-stories. It goes on to explore the problem of Black celebrity in a White nation where that idea was almost a contradiction in terms. Finally, it considers my own role as one more narrator of Raúl’s tale – yet another racial storyteller – and provides an overview of the book’s arguments and structure.

A number of philosophical doctrines developed as responses to some mainstream views of the Iberian colonial period (roughly, from the late 1500s to the early 1800s). Chapter 1 of this book looks closely at four such doctrines whose central themes concerning Latin America can be traced to that period. It first examines the ideas of three Spanish thinkers, Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546), and José de Acosta (ca. 1539-1600). The chapter demonstrates that Las Casas and Vitoria were set to determine the moral status of the Spanish conquest, and developed novel doctrines of practical ethics and political philosophy. Acosta raised empiricist objections to Scholasticism in epistemology and philosophy of science. Pressured by the new physical and social realities of the Americas, these three thinkers were among the early challengers of Thomism as interpreted in the Spanish world during the sixteenth century. But the chapter also examines what Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexican, 1906-1995) argued more recently against the myth of Columbus’ “discovery” of America. Clearly, the end of the colonial period was far from marking the end of reflection on philosophically interesting aspects of the Iberian expansion.

English Enlightenment dramas set in the new world frequently depicted European oppression; from John Dennis’s Liberty Asserted (1704) through Aaron Hill’s Alzira (1736) to Arthur Murphy’s Alzuma (1767), playwrights present actions highly critical of European colonialism. These plays put indigenous critiques of European invasion into circulation, drawing on and rearticulating the writing of Incan Garcilaso de la Vega and Adario, Lahontan’s interlocutor in his famous Dialogue. Rather than regarding such discourse as European projection, I argue that the voices of protesting Incas and Mohawks be recognized as “energumen” or discourse of the other, whose critiques of empire, slavery and forced conversion shaped the development of progressive thought in Europe.