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  • The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlanticby Lisa Ze Winters
  • Jessica Millward
The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic. By Lisa Ze Winters. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 222. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4896-4.)

Three personas converge in Lisa Ze Winters's interdisciplinary account of the experience of black women who fought to be self-possessed individuals in the world of Atlantic slavery: those who were "kept" by their white lovers as mistresses, those who fought for and maintained their free status, and those who were read through stereotype and mythology. Of these three personas, one, Marie Laveau, is historical; one, Ezili Freda, is mythological; and the third, an unnamed eighteenth-century Senegalese woman, is suppositional. Ze Winters culls a range of interdisciplinary sources, from primary historical documents to critical race theory, to accomplish the task of mapping the history of the mulatta concubine.

Ze Winters begins the introduction with an unnamed free African woman boarding a ship in 1728 on Gorée Island, Senegal, destined for New Orleans. With a methodology reminiscent of that used by Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route(New York, 2007), Ze Winters traces the route from Senegal, to Haiti, to New Orleans. The narrative in chapter 1 centers on the Haitian goddess Ezili. Ze Winters addresses many aspects of black women's experiences in the New World through the lens of the mythology of Ezili. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the intimate sexual experiences of black women, which existed on the range from terror to desire. Marie Laveau (a revered nineteenth-century practitioner of religious Voodoo in New Orleans) is presented as an "echo and mirror" to Ezili (p. 71). Laveau's presence in Ze Winters's work functions both on the level of myth and as historical evidence of an actual free woman of color. The third chapter centers on the themes of possession and kinship. To Ze Winters, it is within the space of kinship that free black women exerted their power—even if the very act of producing the family was a result of sexual terror. In chapter 4 Ze Winters addresses one of the key themes of diaspora—the issue of belonging and freedom—by focusing her observations on literary tracks of the time. When viewed together, the women discussed in these chapters function as diaspora echoes of the traumas, the desires, and indeed the magic that free black women possessed.

Ze Winters is part of a growing body of scholars who voice the challenges that researchers of the history of black women face in the absence of formal archival materials. Ze Winters's work interrogates the assumptions around the very term archive: what is included in the term? What is excluded from it? Ze Winters accomplishes her critique of the archive by, among other things, queering slavery and questioning whether the primary intimate relationship in the life of the mulatta concubine was actually with a white man, or rather with herself and other black diasporic women.

Were free black women ever accorded a place where their identity and perceptions about their identity were absent from stereotypes and racial prejudice? Ze Winters is interested in what we know, do not know, and sometimes cannot know about the inner lives of black women—the loss, the silence, the heartbreak, and the role of mythology in their self-concept. [End Page 660]

Ze Winters offers a vision of a global South that is neither static nor easy to characterize. She invites the reader in and asks such probing questions and offers such a fascinating analysis that we are left wanting more, in the best sense. The book ends where it begins, at Gorée Island. Ze Winters suggests that we rethink the circumstances of the unnamed woman who boarded the boat. The question is not what the free black woman was running toward or what she was leaving behind. Ze Winters invites us to imagine the history that can be found in sources beyond the archive.

Jessica Millward
University...

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