Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse by Kimberly Snyder Manganelli (review)

The volume illuminates, through the analysis of travelogues, novels, and other literary sources, the textual genealogies of two symbolic figures, Tragic Mulatta and Tragic Muse. The Tragic Mulatta is a mixed race woman; the Tragic Muse is “a beautiful Jewess.” They both constitute, to use St. Hall’s concept, a “spectacle of the Otherness”—they do not fully belong to established racial categories and incite public imagination by their difference, rootlessness, and exoticism.

The author illuminates the development of racist imageries through the colonial era. “Due to lack of white females in colonies,” she says, “mixed race women became both object of sexual desire and threat to white supremacy.” Mixed race women were demonized for using their sexual charms to corrupt white men and the white race (as seducing white men and preventing them from marrying women of their own race). Since miscegenation destabilized racial categories to an extent, where women of color challenged the symbolic order by being physically white, the racial identities were sustained by social regulations (dress code etc.) and became a “matter of local tradition” only. The white female slaves, displayed and sold at the slave auctions, threatened the very idea of “whiteness” and “white supremacy,” and the image of the white female slave took a particular role in abolitionist movement.

The author argues the “beautiful Jewess” (i.e., famous actresses, socialites from well established Jewish families, as well as literary figures, portraying women of Jewish origin) symbolized “exotic beauty” in continental Europe, as mixed race women did in colonies. “Beautiful Jewess,” despite greater personal autonomy, was a subject of difference, associated with mysteries, eroticism and exoticism; she did not belong fully to any of the established categories and moves between racial and social identities, constituting a threat to the symbolic order and stability of social categories.

The volume illuminates the gradual destabilization of racial categories and human attempts to sustain the facts of “whiteness” and “non-whiteness” through social practices of (self) representations. It brings into debate the double moral and sexual landscapes, where skin pigment was supposed to predetermine the moral and sexual make-up of the person and her position in these double landscapes.

The author introduces the concept of “white hegemonic womanhood”—the white women, despite their otherization as “second sex,” preserve at least some elements of “masculine” virtues as self-control and rationality; the non-white women were deprived of these virtuous residue and embodied pure sexuality beyond civilizational restrains. Some analysis of white and non-white masculinities would be beneficial, in order to grasp full complexity of race and gender relations.

The author reveals love liaisons as a site of struggle and illuminates empowering effects of sexuality and sexual charms as a way through which non-white (non-European) female subjects gained at least partial autonomy and secured some access to wealth and power for themselves and for their origin families. This aspect is particularly valuable and deserves a more detailed examination in the context of subaltern studies, where ruse, mimicry, and pretension are seen as a typical strategy of relatively powerless social groups.

Transatlantic Spectacles of Race is a valuable contribution to race and gender studies. It narrates the spectacular dynamics of power at intersections of race and gender, and illuminates the “racial taxonomies attempting to control uncontrollable shades of color” (27).