Overview
Popular and academic representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and thus they offer evidence of the means to and dimensions of their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure’s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora. Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers’ narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian Vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure’s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.
Full Product Details
Author: Lisa Ze Winters ,
Richard S. Newman ,
Patrick Rael ,
Manisha Sinha
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Imprint: University of Georgia Press
Weight: 0.388kg
ISBN: 9780820353845
ISBN 10: 0820353841
Pages: 240
Publication Date: 15 March 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
College/higher education
,
Professional & Vocational
,
Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Language: English
Reviews
Winters's broadly comparative methodology, especially the consideration of connections to sacred deities of Haitian voodoo and Mami Watta, an African diasporic goddess, may make this an unsettling book to some historians. But that discomfort is precisely why it would work well in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses to spark productive discussions about the nature of historical evidence, in addition to being an important and provocative contribution to African diasporic studies, Atlantic history, African American history, and the histories of sexuality, gender, race, and slavery.--Heather Miyano Kopelson Journal of American History
Author Information
LISA ZE WINTERS is an associate professor of English and African American studies at Wayne State University.
