Cosmetic Ontologies, Cosmetic Subversions: Articulating Black Beauty and Humanity in Luis de Góngora’s “En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento”

Abstract

This essay examines Luis de Góngora y Argote’s poetic representation of black female beauty and humanness in the letrilla “En la fiesta del Santísimo Sacramento” (1609). Góngora underscores the power of black beauty through cosmetics, fine clothing, and the allegorical exegesis of the Song of Songs’s well-known message: “I am black but beautiful.” The poet’s staging of cosmetics’ ideological and rhetorical formulations illustrates how black women construct their own racial identity. The African slave characters do this through the subversive assertion of their natural beauty and humanity, and specifically by reclaiming cosmetic practices and stylizations of the body typically available to European women.

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