Moor, Mulata, Mulatta: Sentimentalism, Racialization, and Benevolent Imperialism in Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita

“Moor, Mulata, Mulatta” argues that Mary Peabody Mann’s Juanita (1887) imports U.S. sentimental abolitionism to a Cuban setting. In so doing, it imports a racial hierarchy divergent from that developing in Cuba. By translating figures such as Eva-like children and the tragic U.S. mulatta into a Cuban narrative, Mann’s novel overwrites figures such as the Cuban mulata and rewrites Cuba’s antislavery and anticolonial movements—erasing their multiracial nature. The alternate Cuba that Juanita envisions exemplifies a late-nineteenth-century U.S. hemispheric imaginary, thereby prefiguring U.S. influence in Cuba following the Spanish-Cuban-American War.