Beyond Babel begins with a vignette about Andrés Sacabuche, a man from Angola living in Cartagena, testifying on the saintly life of Spanish Jesuit missionary Pedro Claver. Throughout the book we get to know Sacabuche, along with Úrsula de Jesús, as key among those figures whom Larissa Brewer-García calls “black intermediaries,” individuals who provided linguistic and spiritual mediation for Africans and their descendants in New Granada and Peru. The author examines how Africans and their descendants occupied the lowest social class in the Spanish colonial hierarchy at the same time that Christian ideology professed that all people were equal before God. This contradiction was leveraged by these intermediaries to promote notions of Black virtue and beauty. The book is readable and extensively researched, successfully weaving microhistories into a more complex web of Black voices and Jesuit missionary practice in Peru and New Granada.
Chapter 1 provides a synopsis of typical...