| Summary: | This article analyses the theatrical representation of an unnamed black woman in Diego Sánchez de Badajoz’s Farsa de la hechizera (1523/1540–49). In doing so, I employ the term “mammy” – and, more loosely, the Castilian word “nodriza” – in order to capture an interdisciplinary mode of literary criticism that resituates Sánchez de Badajoz’s black woman character in Renaissance Iberian cultural and literary studies. A non-passive agent who possesses traits analogous to maternal mammy figures across the African diaspora, this study argues that Sánchez de Badajoz’s black woman personage subverts the work’s suicidal galán’s aristocratic might and ultimately destabilizes his masculinity. To that end, this article sets out to demonstrate, more broadly, that scholarly interpretations of black women in early modern Iberia have overlooked the heterogeneous and subversive ways in which these women paradoxically oscillate between the antinomies of objectification and personhood
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