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1 results

  • Coda

  • Larissa Brewer-García, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Beyond Babel
    Published online:
    22 July 2020
    Print publication:
    06 August 2020, pp 247-250

  • Summary

    After negro as a term for a captive laborer traveled from Spanish and Portuguese into French in the mid-eighteenth century, it took on a new meaning comparable to that of “ghostwriter” in English with the onset of the literary publishing market in the early nineteenth century. This usage eventually translated back into Spanish (as it did with comparable terms in Italian, Polish, and Catalan). Etymological explanations suggest an association with the set of expressions in Spanish, French, and Italian of “trabajar como un negro,” “travailler comme un nègre,” “lavorare come un negro” [to work like a slave]. The continued popularity of these expressions in today’s spoken language indicates a persistent figuring of blackness around tropes of silence, strenuous unrecognized labor, and dispossession.