Larissa Brewer-García. Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 321. Hb, $99.99.

In the last decade, scholars of Colonial Latin America have increasingly turned their focus to the role of translators and intermediaries in the production of knowledge for and about native populations. Less studied, however, has been the role Black interpreters and mediators played in contesting and creating notions and discourses of blackness. Partly, this is a reflection of the archive itself. Unlike Indigenous languages that were studied and described by Spanish missionaries and for which a rich corpus of grammars, vocabularies, and sermon collections (among other genres) survive, no equivalent linguistic efforts were carried out by priests in regard to the different languages spoken by those who survived the Middle Passage. Larissa Brewer-García’s Beyond Babelaims to cover this gap. By focusing on archival material—particularly the Jesuit litterae annuae and the beatification inquest of Pedro Claver—Brewer-García brings to the fore the lives and works of several enslaved Black interpreters working for the Jesuits in Cartagena and Lima. The book highlights how, occupying an intermediary space between the authority of the priests and their lack of knowledge of African languages, they adopted a position of interpretive authority that allowed them to redefine notions of blackness, in particular, black beauty, and black virtue. The reading of the spiritual diary of Úrsula de Jesús, a freed Black woman who took vows at Lima’s Convent of Santa Clara, and whose role as a mystic and spiritual mediator led to the writing of two anonymous hagiographies of her in the seventeenth century, allows Brewer-García to probe how the conceptualization of blackness born out of the work of Black interpreters in Cartagena circulated throughout the Peruvian viceroyalty.