Juan Latino

Juan Latino, professor at Granada during the sixteenth century, was the only black Latinist, scholar, and writer in the European Renaissance.

Life and works

Latino published three volumes of poems between 1573 and 1585."The Signifying Monkey", by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Oxford University Press, hardcover, page 90] He reflected on the black condition and refused a social hierarchy based on skin colour prejudices.

His poem "Asturias Carmen," was dedicated by to Juan de Asturia after his victory over the Morisco insurrection in Granada, known as the War of the Alpujarras (1568–1572). In the text, Latino searched to establish the dignity of all black Africans, relating them to biblical Ethiopia and refusing the idea of natural slavery. He imagined white people subordinated in Ethiopia (a reversed irony) and exalted blackness in the final verses.

He has been hailed as one of the first writers to have used signifyin(g).

References

*"Black Africans in Renaissance Europe" ed. Thomas F. Earle and Kate J. P. Lowe [http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/bethencourt.html]