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

Abstract

The stereotype of the “mulatta concubine”—autonomous, beautiful, extravagantly dressed, often free, and economically ascendant owing to her sexual relationships with white men—circulated with remarkable consistency across Atlantic world slave societies. Lisa Ze Winters’ book demonstrates the ubiquity of the image by drawing on print, archival, and visual sources, as well as religious iconography, from Africa, Europe, and the Americas from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. P...