Miscegenation Now!

Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000. By Suzanne Bost. University of Georgia Press, 2003.

Mixed Race Literature. Edited by Jonathan Brennan. Stanford University Press, 2002.

Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders. By John Francis Burke. Texas A&M University Press, 2002.

"Miscegenation": Making Race in America. By Elise Lemire. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Mixture—whether cultural, racial, social, or national—seems to occupy a place of privilege in a US contemporary national imaginary. On a cultural level, hybridity and its myriad manifestations have become keywords in understanding change, alteration, and regeneration. Understood in their rosiest light, these terms have been used to name the subversive quality of identities in disintegration. From a more pragmatic angle, they simply manifest the power of advanced capitalism to morph into ever more addicting forms of consumption. Although some would like to view an embrace of the hybrid as an affirmation of difference within sameness, it has also been deployed as a flattened and ahistorical celebration of a predictable pluralism. The span from fusion foods to Jennifer Lopez is not broad.

For a variety of critics engaged with issues of identity and culture—from Nestor Garc'a Canclini to Edouard Glissant to Stuart Hall—hybridity has remained a driving conceptualization. Similarly, critics concerned with the asymmetrical power relations between major and minor cultures and constituencies assert the importance of borders, contact zones, and transformative interstitial points as key to understanding the production of both culture and identity. However, in recent years, terms such as hybridity and borderlands have been criticized and sharply challenged in numerous ways. Neoconservatives as well as those on the left have condemned the hybrid as a threat to an imagined US consensus about national identity and for allowing the reinstatement of a most vapid and empty liberal pluralism, respectively. The shallow multiculturalism often celebrated on college campuses and elsewhere in the 1980s and early 1990s appropriated hybridity—and its related terms mestizaje, mestizo, mixed, and transculturated—as terms to articulate a depoliticized, pluralistic national identity. Consequently, notions of hybridity have suffered arapid decline in intellectual credibility in the past decade.

Simultaneously, numerous ethnic and American studies critics have sought to demonstrate that concrete forms of hybridity—racial, social, cultural, and political—can promote a theoretical and critical apparatus that is not depoliticized, ahistorical, and aesthetically generalized. For this reason, it is satisfying to see that important work in American studies has not shied away from confronting the vexed notion of hybridity on numerous planes.

Suzanne Bost undertakes a most ambitious study in Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850–2000. The book provides an instructive and pedagogically useful overview of the relationship between racial mixture and selected literary production in the Americas. The study ambitiously attempts to encompass extraordinary temporal and geographic breadth. It traces a critical roadmap that moves from a comparison of discourses about Latin American mestiza versus North American mulatta identity to an overview of Caribbean racial histories to a consideration of the relationship between biracial and bisexual identities. In addition, Bost seeks to trace a historical arc that encompasses an immense transformation in how race signifies differently within vastly dissimilar cultural contexts: from the American South to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti; from the American Southwest to Mexico, Santa Cruz, Barbados, and Jamaica.

Although the scope of her study requires broad strokes, Bost's work offers an important discussion on the relation between literary representation and the socially discursive power of racial mixture. In large part, the value of Mulattas and Mestizas is its focus on the insistence of race in producing identity within the Americas. She uses the term mestizaje to highlight hemispherically the mixture of identities. Although she acknowledges that promoting racial mixture positively may too easily blur conflicts within hybridity, Bost emphasizes the potentially decentering power that results from a blurring of racial delineation.

Bost's study situates the political, racial, and genealogical strands of such contemporary writers as Cherri&eacute...