Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata BodyPosted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2010-09-29 17:58Z by Steven |
Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body
Theatre Research International
Volume 27, Number 2 (2002)
pages 136-152
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883302000226
Alicia Arrizón, Professor of Women’s Studies
University of California, Riverside
A Cuban cocktail called mulata inspires an examination of the mulata body. Beyond an analysis of the cocktail as a commercial commodity, the mulata body can be placed within an intercultural space shaped by the processes of colonization, slavery and race relations. By examining the grammars in the mulata cocktail, the discussion moves the subject through other texts and discourses in order to mediate the mulata’s embodied genealogy as a form of transculturation. As a hybrid body that inhabits a ‘racialized’ performativity, the mulata’s subaltern agency is imagined beyond the exoticism charged to its presence in the Latin American and Caribbean contexts. A closer look at the mulata body helps to trace not only the process of objecthood affected by masculinist power and desire, but also by the way the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved.
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