Popular and academic representations of free mulatta concubines repeatedly depict women of mixed black African and white racial descent as defined by their sexual attachment to white men. In The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic, Lisa Ze Winters contends that the uniformity of these representations conceals the figure s centrality to the practices and production of diaspora, and that these depictions offer evidence of the dimensions of freedom within Atlantic slave societies.

Beginning with a meditation on what captive black subjects may have seen and remembered when encountering free women of color living in slave ports, the book traces the echo of the free mulatta concubine across the physical and imaginative landscapes of three Atlantic sites: Goree Island, New Orleans, and Saint Domingue (Haiti). Ze Winters mines an archive that includes a 1789 political petition by free men of color, a 1737 letter by a free black mother on behalf of her daughter, antebellum newspaper reports, travelers narratives, ethnographies, and Haitian vodou iconography. Attentive to the tenuousness of freedom, Ze Winters argues that the concubine figure s manifestation as both historical subject and African diasporic goddess indicates her centrality to understanding how free and enslaved black subjects performed gender, theorized race and freedom, and produced their own diasporic identities.

LISA ZE WINTERS is an associate professor of English and African American Studies at Wayne State University.

Cover design: Kaelin Chappell Broaddus
Cover illustration:
Author photo: M. J. Murwaka

Race in the Atlantic World, 1700 1900

Published in Cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia s Program in African American History

The University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org"

LISA ZE WINTERS is an associate professor of English and African American studies at Wayne State University.