Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco, by Meira Goldberg, adjunct associate professor of Film, Media, and Performing Arts, was given the Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) for the best 2019 book on theater history and cognate disciplines.
Sonidos Negros traces how, between 1492—when Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula coincided with Christopher Columbus’s landing on Hispaniola—and 1933—when Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca published his Theory and Play of the Duende—the vanquished Moor became Black; and how the imagined Gitano (“Gypsy,” or Roma) embodies the warring images and sounds of this process.
The chair of the Hewitt award committee said that the book “questioned everything we thought we knew about flamenco, and offered us a completely new understanding. Indeed, it struck us as a field-changing work.”
Sonidos also received an honorable mention for the Sally Banes Book Prize, which is awarded to the best 2019 book on the intersections of theater and dance/movement.