‘The wages of empire’: American inventions of mixed-race identities and Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012)

ABSTRACT Within her collection, Thrall (2012), Natasha Trethewey turns to Mexico’s eighteenth-century casta paintings to contemplate the enthralling nature of race and mixed-race identity in the United States. For much of the eighteenth century, casta paintings were employed by the elite to establish a lexicon of difference wherein the Other would be constructed and categorized. This aspect of material culture gave privileged Spaniards the illusion of control over an increasingly complicated and diverse population that included Africans – enslaved and free – as well as local Indigenous nations. This is significant when considering the history of the Americas as a violent colonial space within which peoples of difference were often dehumanized within the rhetoric and slave economies of imperial rule. Ultimately, Trethewey creates a poetic vision that establishes a substantial connection between the visual cultures of eighteenth-century Mexico and the contested nature of contemporary race relations in U.S. America.