García Moscardó, Ester2024-10-232024-10-232024Ester García Moscardó, ""Sensibility on Stage: Gender, Race, and the Modulations of Feeling in the Hispanic Theater"", in Isabel Burdiel, Ester García Moscardó and Elena Serrano (eds.), Histories of Sensibilities. Visions of Gender, Race and Emotions in the Global Enlightenment, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2025, pp. 1-20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003342236-59781003342236https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003342236-5https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14468/24106At the dawn of modernity, fictional re-creations of reality constitute a privileged source for observing internal tensions in the process that gave birth to the modern—and national—political subject, built on notions of race and gender. In taking up these questions, this chapter analyzes the dramatic figure of El negro sensible [The Sensitive Black Man] proposed by the playwright Luciano Francisco Comella in 1798. Although the Black man on stage was a very familiar figure in Hispanic theaters around 1800, the Black characters that appear in the melodramas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are different from those of previous eras, as they lose comedic qualities and become dramatic. In the framework of the humanitarianism developed in the Enlightened culture of sensibility, White authors present, in a problematic way, an element that had not been presented before: the slave condition of the Black character. In this context, the dramatic figure of the sentimental Black man and the slave masculinity that he carries allows us to explore literary fiction as a space for debate about the limits of the acceptable subject in a fully transforming world.eninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess55 Historiacapítulo de libro