Mixed Race Studies

Perception and the Mulatto Body in Inquisitorial Spain: A Neurohistory*

Past and Present
First published online: 2016-04-16
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtw001

Cristian Berco, Associate Professor of History
Bishop’s University, Quebec

On 1 July 1625, their hands issuing from Dominican cloaks as black as night, inquisitors in Madrid voted to arrest Luisa Nuñez on suspicion of practising love magic and divination using a stolen altar stone. It fell to the inquisitorial secretary Gaspar Isidro de Argüello to lead the arrest. Since witnesses had provided no physical description of the suspect, all Argüello had to go by was a name and address. Despite this lack of information, on Luisa’s opening the door Argüello rapidly assessed her and labelled her with a racializing term plucked out of the air: ‘mulatta’. However, this categorization was problematic. Luisa would never refer to herself in this way, either in testimony or in the formal life narrative she would recount before the inquisitors. According to her, she was the American-born daughter of a Spanish notary and a Mexican Indian woman, and was now a citizen of Madrid and wife to a Galician courier.

While the label ‘mulatta’ embodied ambiguous meanings typical of the era (it could refer to either skin colour or category of being), its application was important. Not only did the word conjure up a negative stereotype particularly detrimental to a suspected sorceress, but the label continued to define Luisa as a racialized being long after her death. Even the modern catalogue containing her trial specifically uses the term in its one-line summary. In a way, the increasing tendency of early modern Europeans to connect the phenotype of colonized and enslaved peoples with inherent negative characteristics not only victimized Luisa but also reflected the long-term emergence of race as an ontological category. However, because such identity categories define our world-view today, to the point where we deploy them automatically, we tend to think of the cognitive process behind racialization as…

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A Telenovela, Slavery, and the Diaspora

African American Intellectual History Society
2016-04-17

Greg Childs

A Escrava Isaura, the 1875 novel by Bernardo Guimarães, was one of a number of late 19th century works of fiction in Brazil that focused on abolitionism. The story revolves around a young enslaved girl named Isaura, her efforts to gain freedom and become married to Alvaro, a wealthy white man who believes fervently in abolition, as well as her trials and tribulations with the plantation overseer who aims to seduce her and make her his concubine. It was quite transparently an anti-slavery propaganda novel. But it was also quite transparently an idealized romance, an effort to portray liberal whiteness as a heroic and saving grace for enslaved peoples. The novel was a huge success in Brazil and catapulted the author to immediate national fame.

Later in 1976 the novel would be reconceptualized as a television show, or telenovela. It was wildly successful and became one of the most watched television programs in the world, broadcasted in over 80 countries. It was undoubtedly a smash success in South America but also in the Soviet Union, China, Poland, and Hungary. In fact, it was in Hungary where the most intriguing- or depending on your perspective, most comical- story about the telenovela comes to us. According to legend, it was in Hungary in the 1980s where the faithful viewers of Escrava Isaura took up collections after the final episode of the series to help purchase Isaura’s freedom…

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Mixed-race indigenous people should get benefits extended to those with Indian status, Canadian court rules

The Los Angeles Times
2016-04-14

Christopher Guly

For decades in Canada, people of mixed indigenous and European ancestry didn’t qualify for “Indian” status and were denied a host of benefits granted to other First Nations people, including government funding, free postsecondary education and health benefits, and hunting and fishing rights.

In a landmark ruling Thursday, that changed. The Canadian Supreme Court declared that hundreds of thousands of mixed-race indigenous people, known as Metis in Canada, along with non-status Indians living off reservations, should have access to the same government programs and services as those with Indian status.

“This is something that will impact about 600,000 people across the country who have been denied recognition or access to entitlements that they now have been declared by the court as having,” said Dwight Dorey, national chief of the Ottawa-based Congress of Aboriginal Peoples…

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Blackass: a race rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis

The Guardian
2016-04-13

Ainehi Edoro

Ainehi Edoro reflects on Blackass, a novel that subjects Kafka’s classic to African literary conventions – and, in the process, gives an iconic European story ‘an extreme but necessary makeover’

Last year, I received a review copy of A Igoni Barrett’s Blackass from his Nigerian publisher. I knew it was a rewrite of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I just didn’t know what to expect. To be quite frank, I was a bit worried. Kafka has not always lived a happy life in Africa. When Guinean novelist Camara Laye wrote a Kafka-inspired novel, he was dragged through a gauntlet of scandals. Kind commentators called his work derivative and unoriginal. Others were less kind. They accused him of borderline plagiarism. Some even went as far as suggesting that he couldn’t have written the novel without the help of a ghostwriter of some kind. But Blackass, it turns out, is different. Barrett essentially subjects Kafka’s classic to the pressures African literary conventions, and, in the process, gives an iconic European story an extreme, but much needed makeover…

Read the entire review here.