The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic by Lisa Ze Winters (review)

In The Mulatta Concubine, Lisa Ze Winters explores the emergence and evolution of African diasporic identities—specifically those of women of mixed African and European ancestry—by focusing on historical, popular, and academic depictions of "the free(d) mulatta concubine" (2). Ze Winters is interested in tracing "the intersections of race, sexuality, intimacy, geography, and freedom in the context of an African diaspora" through the lens of the free(d) mulatta concubine not only in history and memory but also in fiction and fantasy (2). The ongoing importance of this figure, she contends, stems from her dual role as both a liminal, flesh-and-blood woman and a sexualized racial object produced and embedded in the economies of slavery. The Mulatta Concubine is therefore best viewed as an extended meditation on the experiences, meanings, and possibilities of black and mixed-race female subjectivities within and across Atlantic slave societies.

From the outset, Ze Winters confronts the problem of the dominant archive: namely, the absence or fragmentary presence of enslaved and free women of African and mixed ancestry in official documents written and preserved by white men. As she points out, the difficulty of uncovering the thoughts and motivations of captive or free women of mixed descent, and the ways in which these women navigated slave societies and the "incoherence of diaspora" necessitates an unorthodox approach (18). To this end, she frames her analysis around written and visual representations of specific women, both real and imagined, in three critical Atlantic slave ports: Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal; New Orleans; and Saint Domingue (Haiti). In each site, she analyzes overlapping accounts of "real" women of mixed ancestry and explicitly fictitious or mythical women of color, seeking to demonstrate how the existence of one invariably haunts and informs depictions and understandings of the other. Ze Winters thereby seeks to challenge long-held assumptions about the lives, identities, and intimate practices of free women of color in slave ports throughout the Atlantic world. She is careful, however, to differentiate between the real and the illusory—insofar as that is possible in certain cases—and does so in productive and imaginative ways throughout the book.

For example, Ze Winters compares ethnographic descriptions of the Haitian vodou goddess, Ezili Freda, to accounts of African signares—local African and mixed-race women in French Senegal who engaged in long-term relationships with white men—included in published eighteenth-century European male travelers' narratives and in twentieth-century guidebooks. The signares were valued for their position as female go-betweens, women of importance who facilitated cultural and commercial transactions between European traders and local Africans. Yet we still know very little about their personal backgrounds and the paths that led them to become signares.

One of the author's most important points here and throughout The Mulatta Concubine is "the insufficiency of the archive to account for beginnings" (47). The origins of racially mixed, globally dispersed individuals, she states, are nearly impossible to pinpoint, whether for an African diasporic goddess or for historical actors such as the signares. Ze Winters uses European travel accounts and modern guidebooks and commentary to fruitful effect, showing how the signares, due to their illusive presence in the archive, have retained their status as historical and mythical subjects over the centuries. Although the signares arose from a specific socio-economic, political, and cultural context rooted in the violence of slavery and diaspora, they are nonetheless frequently represented as a "ghostly apparition," nothing more than "ephemeral traces of an originally material subject" (55).

To integrate these theoretical insights with the nature of black and mixed-race women's diasporic identities, Ze Winters grounds each chapter in the personal histories of specific women of color, particularly in her chapters focused on New Orleans and Saint Domingue. She uses a variety of sources, including newspaper accounts...