The Mulatta Concubine

Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4154792
AutoresHeather Miyano Kopelson (autor de correspondencia)
Año2017
Volumen103
Número4
Páginas1036-1037
Fecha de publicación2017-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaw534
OpenAlexW2589589960
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas7

Lisa Ze Winters's vivid and insightful analysis moves synchronically across time and space to consider representations of the “ostensibly free(d) mulatta concubine” beyond the dichotomy of being either a seductive temptress or a continuous victim of rape (p. 6). Drawing on written, oral, and visual sources from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century from Senegal; colonial Saint Domingue and Haiti; the United States, especially New Orleans; and African American literature, her project is to imagine how “black subjects within diaspora”—captive male and female Africans, the often-elided free men of color, and the free women of color themselves—perceived the possibilities and limits of the always-tenuous freedom embodied in that figure (p. 22, emphasis in original). Winters's carefully chosen terminology of “free(d) mulatta concubine” signals her attention to “the costs of ... status and power to this specifically gendered and racialized diasporic figure,” and her engagement with African diasporic scholarship about the refractions of terror and memory that defy connections laid out in the official archive (p. 58). The first chapter considers the tension between the origin stories of the signares—a significant class of free women of color in the Senegalese islands of Gorée and Saint-Louis who emerged by the mid-eighteenth century from local cultural practices as well as from their sexual connections to European men, and the varied aspects of the Haitian voodoo deity Ezili as suggestive of the ungendering of the black body, a central trauma of diaspora. In the second chapter, the efforts of free women of color to protect their intimate lives from being laid bare recur in the archival uncertainty surrounding the historical figure of Marie Laveau, a free woman of color in mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans popularly known as a “voodoo queen” (p. 67); the suit brought by a group of New Orleans free women of color against authorities following their 1850 arrest for engaging in voodoo practices; and nineteenth-century illustrations of the signares in which their modesty was enabled by the lascivious display of enslaved black women's bodies. The third chapter compares the simultaneous and clashing claims on the image of the free(d) mulatta concubine made in the 1789 petition of free men of color in Saint-Louis to the French Estates-General and in the French commercial agent Dominique Harcourt Lamiral's 350-page appendix. Chapter 4 examines the geographically specific mid-nineteenth-century critiques of stereotypes of the mulatta in an ethnography of Senegal written by Abbé David Boilat, whose mother was a signare and father was French, and a travel memoir by Eliza Potter, a free woman of color from the northern United States

Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Diaspora · Political science · Power (physics · SAINT · Scholarship · Sociology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law

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