Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean (review)

José F. Buscaglia-Salgado is a Puerto Rican author and Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is also the director of the Cuban and Caribbean Program. His interdisciplinary training in history and Latin American Studies (B.A.), architecture (M.A.), and comparative literature (Ph.D.) allow him to cast a broad net in capturing the complexities of race in the Caribbean. The results are fruitful and lead to what the Cuban writer José Lezama Lima termed "the pleasure of unsuspected connections" for those who wish to tackle this extensive tome.

This book situates the mulatto experience as an analytical device to understand the complexity of Caribbean history. The author conceptualizes the term mulataje (analogous to the more familiar mestizaje or miscegenation) to encompass the multifaceted dimensions of Caribbean aesthetics that could lead to the elimination of racial taxonomy. He traces how Iberian culture and politics from the 16^th century onward, as well as U.S. intervention in the late nineteenth century, conditioned the multiple discourses on race and nation in the Caribbean that endure today.

Buscaglia-Salgado's sweeping account shows that the antecedents to the Caribbean mulatto originated well before the European conquest of the Americas. Conquistadores' affinity with North African Moors and Moorish rule in Iberia over seven centuries led them to draw parallels about race and class structure in Spain with the New World colonies. The author enlists numerous discourses from the Old and New Worlds to show how miscegenation, race, and (to a lesser extent) class endured in the Caribbean. Using archival resources from Seville as well as a fine collection of original photographs, Buscaglia-Salgado identifies certain "European Ideals" that appear in the fine arts (sculpture, painting), literature, and architecture. Ironically, nineteenth-century wars across the Caribbean did not unleash the kinds of social and political liberties that the mulatto movements two centuries back sought to invoke. Instead, true national liberation has been derailed because of the historical intricacies that fuse race and nation together.

"I argue that the Haitian Revolution of the European Ideal was programmatically and symbolically unmasked and turned around, a movement that later acquired graceful and complex aesthetic form in Plácido's verses."

(xxiii)

Indeed, the author argues that excessive scholarly attention to Cuban and Puerto Rican independence have overlooked the significance of the Haitian and Dominican independence movements.

Six chapters frame his argument. He first assesses Washington Irving's "American Columbiad" as the result of imperial domination. Examples from the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain, El Morro Castle in Santiago de Cuba, and decorative elements from the U.S. Capitol are used to show how empire, conquest, and race allowed European powers to recast their imperialist agendas in benign and humanitarian ways.

Chapter Two, "Contesting the Ideal," draws parallels between elements of Moorish Granada and the religious architecture of Santo Domingo. Mudejar designs of the cathedral in Santo Domingo reveal Arabesque detail such as the pointing of windows to Mecca and horseshoe arches that reflect the prayer niches (mihrabs) of mosques. Andrés Sánchez Galque's painting, Mulatos de Esmeraldas (1599), is used to illustrate how dark-skinned peoples in the New World could appropriate and redefine a "metaphorical movement of transgression that defined all analogical practices of space" (91).

The author revisits the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas in the next chapter to assess the friar's premonitions about the conquest. Las Casas' failure to establish Spanish and native settlements in Venezuela led him to write his opus magnum, Historia de las Indias, documenting the first six decades of Spanish rule in the Americas. However, his death in 1566 prohibited him...