Portuguese enclaves in Brazil and Angola maintained bilateral trade and cultural exchanges from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. While in Brazil the growth of the mulatto population appears as a key feature of Luso-Brazilian colonialism, and Afro-Brazilians have come to constitute the majority of the current Brazilian population, mulattos never exceeded 2 per cent of the Angolan population prior to the 1970s. And yet Luso-Brazilian miscegenation eventually became the bedrock of ‘lusotropicalism’, an essential component of (...) Portugal's colonial ideology in the second half of the twentieth century. To understand these paradoxes, beyond the demographic figures, this chapter examines the historical processes concerning mulattos as a group on both sides of the South Atlantic. Among its conclusions is that miscegenation is a necessary but insufficient condition for the growth of a mulatto population. (shrink)

One of the most common threads in the Caribbean tapestry races which have populated the region over the last five centuries largely through forced or voluntary migration, is that there have emerged mixtures of the different racial groups. A large proportion of Caribbean women and men are referred to euphemistically as ‘mixed race’. The terms used to describe people of mixed race vary by territory and have been incrementally added to or changed over time. The original nomenclatures such as sambo, (...) musteephino, mulatto, creole, etc. have been replaced at present to include terms like brown skin, mulatto, clear skin, light skin, red-nigger, dougla and browning. The title of the article comes from a contemporary dancehall song in Jamaica in which the black singer, Buju Banton, unwittingly echoes an unspoken yet shared notion of female desirability in the Caribbean: a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women. In the ongoing constructions of femininity in the region, class and skin colour have intersected with race to produce hierarchies and stereotypes of femininity based on racial mixing. Drawing on some of the historical data available, particularly that of the pioneering research in this area produced by Lucille Mathurin in 1974, this article interrogates some aspects of miscegenation in the Jamaican past, to configure these with gender, race and class relations in the present. The article does not attempt to arrive at conclusive findings but to contribute to the ongoing process in the region, and elsewhere, of differentiating the category ‘woman’ in historiography and sociology. (shrink)

This is an study of phrases and topics by which was known the Cuba island during the XIX century. Analysis of the origins of phrases such as "la Albión ofAn-ierica". "La Siempre Fiel Isla de Cuba", "La perla de las Antillas", "La llave del Golfo": of systems as slavery, plantations, miscegenation, the idea of death, and the myth of mulatto. It is concluded that travelers, and well-read, even the own inhabitants, generated upon this extremely complex society, a series of (...) ideas, coined images. and spred expressions from subjective and particular forms of envisaging reality. (shrink)

This paper examines the plays of African-American playwright Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962) and The Owl Answers (1963), which remain important for their engagement with notions of African-American identity, resistance and agency through their attention to mixed race female characters or mulattos who experience bodily and psychological traumas that demonstrate the abuse of the colonized on a deeply visceral level. Kennedy's plays have remained controversial because of their failure to comply with the nationalistic orientation of the Black Arts (...) Movement (BAM) of 1960s America. I aim to examine these plays through a framework of postcolonial-feminist performance analysis that finds its way back to histories of colonization and slavery, enabling through such returns, a compelling critique of the manoeuvrings of racial hierarchies and power imbalances. As well, I argue that Kennedy's protagonists are de-essentialized fractured beings who fail to embody either White superiority or Black nationalist pride, as they oscillate between two polarities. Such failure (on the part of Kennedy's mulattos) allows for a strategic de-essentialization of identity that interrogates fixed categorization. As well, through a form that is fluid, fragmented and blurs the distinctions among history, memory, space and time, her works impart political agency to the characters and enable an empowered sense of the ‘self-in-process.’. (shrink)

I find it hard to understand what can be meant by ‘mestiço (mixed-race) art’.No one disputes that the Brazilian people are of mixed race, but even if this is the case, the idea that their artistic creations should also be ‘mestiço’ seems to be an argument that may be logical but is unverifiable in practice.The first difficulty is that I can see no causal relationship between an individual's racial make-up and the character of the object he or she produces or (...) creates. In my view human individuals are essentially cultural. So it is on the cultural level that they are defined and their creations described. From this it can be concluded that if a mulatto transmits something of his mulatice (‘mulatto-ness’) to his art, this has nothing to do with the type of blood flowing in his veins, but is related to the influence that his position as a mulatto has on his world view, if indeed he has one. Personally I can see no sign of it in the work of Machado de Assis, for example. Should writers' social and racial position influence their work? Of course. But not to the extent that it becomes visible and less still so that it determines the quality or meaning of the work. (shrink)

This article confronts the problems of establishing normative restrictive claims for delegitimizing conduct and attitudes of cultural appropriation. Using C. Thi Nguyen’s and Matthew Strhol’s intimacy account (IA) as a background, I offer an alternative of cultural adoption relying upon Alain Locke’s value theory and philosophical pluralism. The phenomenon of cultural adoption I propose develops some insights from Nguyen’s and Strohl’s IA, while critiquing their framework’s perceived limitations. By adding loyalty and intensity to the prerogatives of intimacy, the hope is (...) that a more nuanced approach to the ethical concerns of cultural adoption will be achieved. My contention is that Locke’s notions of a racial sense or kinship feeling provides stronger grounds for establishing an ethics of the passerby or what I will call non-intimate encounters. Next, I will argue that the interpersonal relations of groups cannot be interpreted as simple, but only as complex wholes. Instead of monoliths and exclusive binaries, we have to recognize variation within groups and learn to think in what Albert Murray calls “mulatto,” or a culture of novel hybrids. In the final section, I argue that Locke’s philosophy, broadly construed, operates as a contraceptive knowledge against the growing imperial apathy of populists and absolutists. We should work to abandon forms of political and epistemological violence by rejecting these forms of cultural abuse. It is my grand contention that human groups express in their differences a uniqueness that makes us distrust or admire and like each other. (shrink)

On the shores of Madagascar there appeared in the 19th century an influential group whose members were called—erroneously —by strangers as well as by the Merina oligarchy, the “Malagasy creóles”. As a matter of fact the latter are half-castes born of Malagasies and (prevalently) Frenchmen. However, their contemporaries did not confuse them with the mulattos or malata (zona malata), descendants of filibusters or pirates who frequented the East Coast, and their Malagasy mates; on the other hand they, themselves, refused the (...) designation of malata. Thus the name of “Malagasy creole”—even if false, because it does not describe Europeans born in Madagascar—defines a precise social group well into the 19th century. (shrink)

This work argues that the usurpation of the Haitian Revolution by the Affranchis, petit-bourgeois black (creole) landowners and mulatto elites, from the Africans on the island seeking total freedom from the mercantilism and liberalism of the capitalist world-system under European hegemony, rendered it (The Haitian Revolution) an insignificant black bourgeois revolution focused on racial vindicationism and equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with whites within the denouement of the aforementioned systemicity. The latter move placed the Revolution on par with (...) the American one, which was a counterrevolution to the abolition of slavery and the slave trade under mercantilism and liberalism. The work concludes, had the Revolution remained under either the directorship of the African leadership seeking to implement their (communal) lakou system throughout the island, or the Kojèveian synthesis of Dessalines, it would become a significant revolution offering a counter systemicity to the Protestant/Catholic Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under European and American hegemony. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Haiti Can't BreatheNéhémy Pierre-Dahomey (bio)Translated by David F. BellI'm not particularly familiar with recent politics in Haiti. Nor, as it were, with the contemporary history of the country. In some sense, the difference between recent politics and contemporary history is rather delicate. History would be the most profound social, political, and economic points of contention behind the daily lives of a population under siege. Not simply those talked about (...) while people travel in public transportation (Haitians talk a lot while in public transportation), but also the interpretive matrices mobilized to speak about these problems. As for current events, they are the province of newspaper headlines, those front pages and editorial pages most often read and shared, the public opinion machine.Of course, a few snippets of news come to me: the rise of kidnapping, political instability, the opposition declaring that the presidential mandate has ended, a government sponsored referendum to change the constitution, upcoming elections. As I write this piece (summer 2021), armed banditry is rife in many working-class neighborhoods. There are victims by the dozens nearly every day.As I was asking myself how best to express the bicentennial dyspnea of the Haitian people, I learned about the assassination of the president of the Republic in his private residence.Haiti could not breathe. Now it is suffocating.I recently published a novel entitled Combats (March 2021) in which the characters live in a nineteenth-century rural setting. They experience the full force of the first consequences provoked by the infamous independence debt, well understood by Haitians and analyzed by international specialists such as David Graeber and Thomas Piketty.After its independence in 1804, Haiti was not accepted into the concert of nations. The country, founded by hordes of previously enslaved Blacks and by freed Mulattos, was a bad example, a model not to be emulated so geographically near a slave society, the United States, and the Antilles belonging to France. No economic power, that is, no white country defining itself as such, recognized the independence of the new Black, abolitionist, and egalitarian population. The isolation of Haiti thus began at the very moment of its foundation. [End Page 165]In a vain attempt to escape the embargo and to construct a collective destiny at the international level, Haiti accepted a colossal debt imposed on it by France. Charles X, king of France and Navarre, forced Jean-Pierre Boyer, supreme leader of the Haitian nation, to assume the responsibility for a ransom of 120 million francs. The economist Thomas Piketty calculates that this was equivalent to 28 billion euros in today's currency. David Graeber, in his Debt: The First 500 Years, considers it to be the most egregious debt in history. In truth, for Haitians, this strange transaction consisted in buying lands they had already conquered in their independence struggle, having taken them from the previous colonial settlers representing the French state.Since the previously emancipated ancestors were considered the colonial settlers' property, Haitians, under threat from the French army, assumed the weight of this debt, which really consisted in purchasing—from their previous torturers—their very persons and those of their grandparents. In other words, after the war of independence, begun by Black Maroons as soon as they arrived on the island of Haiti, pursued by Toussaint Louverture against slavery, brought successfully to a conclusion by Jean Jacques Dessalines through victorious military battles (November 1803 at Vertières, for example), after this long road toward emancipation, France, supported by all the foreign powers of the period, extracted from Haiti recognition of the debt in 1826, that is, during the first half of the nineteenth century, at the very moment when the independent countries of the world were beginning to undergo a massive industrialization.Haiti clearly missed out on this entrance into the industrial age of the steam engine. It remained an "essentially agricultural" country because every year it had to pay debt service—including interest—every year until the second half of the 20th century!Like many others I saw the images of the white man, Derek Chauvin, resting his knee on George Floyd's neck for eight... (shrink)

This article is proposed to broaden the historiographic horizons of the participation of underling groups in the historical processes of New Granada. This paper makes part of a research project intended to report the actions carried out by the plebs of Santa Fe de Bogota at the dawn of independence. This project is aimed at revealing the cotidianity of those subjects invisibilized by official history, like the indigenous, mestizo, mulatto, African-American and poor people; the mass or the plebs, as (...) they have been labeled. This submission reconstructs the actions, interests and daily life of slave women in the context of independence. (shrink)

À Santiago deux femmes s’affrontent. La procédure du délit d’injures nécessite, dans cette société orale de la première moitié du xviiie siècle, l’exposé de questions sensibles qui concernent, dans ce cas particulier, les identités féminines. Croisées par de multiples variables, dont l’ethnie est l’une des plus importantes, ces identités de femmes s’expriment dans des lieux sociaux plus ou moins contestés : la fragilité de ces identités s’observe dans l’expression de la violence privée et dans les discours juridiques. Réfléchir sur la (...) manière d’appréhender et de vivre les possibilités d’être femme dans une des villes de l’Amérique hispanique est un des objectifs de cette analyse. L’autre, montre comment les discours sur le métissage et les valeurs qu’ils portent s’incarnent dans les sujets au niveau des conflits mineurs, quotidiens, jusqu’à faire basculer, à travers la parole et l’opinion sur autrui, des parcours individuels. (shrink)