Undoing Empire: Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean

The author’s strategy is to read a series of texts for what they might reveal about mulatez in the Caribbean. The texts include canonical writings such as Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Historia de las Indias, C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Washington Irving’s A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada and A History of the Life and Travels of Christopher Columbus, as well as a number of paintings, sculptures, and buildings. By mulatez he does not mean to refer to “marked bodies or racial categories, but rather to a history of subversion of those categories through the metaphorical movement,” which he investigates and describes “in a per-formative way” in the present book (pp. xvii – xviii). That is, he intends to use narratives of what he calls mulatez to challenge boundaries between coloniality and modernity, and between non-European objects of exploitation and European “rational subjects.” Even as he demonstrates how those boundaries have been reinforced and legitimized by intransigent systems of colonial domination, he fails to demonstrate how mulatez might pose an alternative. For the most part, the book’s conceptual framework serves to replicate the very thing it critiques: the imposition of some kind of racial order, in which mulatez is in between whiteness (European ideal) and blackness (the anticolonial ideal).The first chapter uses Washington Irving to frame a discussion of historiographic traditions that romanticized Spain and portrayed the United States as born of an immaculate conception. He then analyzes images of Christopher Columbus in the paintings of Randolph Rogers, whose Columbus Doors: The Landing of Columbus in the New World and Columbus’s First Encounter with the Indians are all hung in the U.S. capitol building in Washington, DC. In these, Buscaglia-Salgado argues, Randolph (like Irving) renders Columbus as an apt and noble founder of America and distances the explorer from barbaric Spanish practices, such as raping Arawak women.If Columbus ought to be seen as an enlightened founder of the New World, it is in the Old World, rather than the New, that the origins of mulatez ought to be located. The Iberian Peninsula witnessed a great deal of cultural and sexual interchange — a diverse land in which Muslims, Jews, and Christians cohabited for many years and borrowed, appropriated, and learned from one another’s religious, social, and intellectual institutions. Furthermore, it continued to be so even after Muslims and Jews were expelled: many continued on in Spain as conversos or moriscos and eventually, he contends, ended up in the New World. Lacking textual documentation of this phenomenon, Buscaglia-Salgado endeavors to verify the presence and influence of what he calls “the Moors” with an analysis of architectural design and ornament in American churches.His analysis of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez argues for the creation of a new subject: a protagonist of the circumnavigation narrative who hails from the New World rather than the Old. Ultimately, as a creole, Ramírez fails where Europeans have succeeded, and his journeys are filled with more disasters than triumphs. This character, who in the end “failed to escape the condition he was born into,” is meant to reveal something of the mulatto condition. Despite having “traveled the world full circle, Ramírez was unable to forego the duties he was assigned at birth as a creole from San Juan.” This, Buscaglia-Salgado argues, “entailed the unquestionable disposition to sacrifice himself for the preservation of the empire” (p. 141).A final chapter on C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins and other narratives of anticolonial uprisings concludes similarly, arguing that the mulatto’s in-between-ness is precisely the source of his failure as a revolutionary and visionary. There is not space here to provide a full critique of his analysis; suffice it to say that as Michel-Rolph Trouillot and others have shown, the Haitian Revolution was so complex and proceeded through so many stages that ascribing its “failure” to a single cause makes little sense. In the end, the author is trapped between the heterogeneity and complexity of the stories he tells and his claim that the mulatto has some kind of essential ontological status. Moreover, this essence is not really recognizable in the texts he has chosen. His conclusion, namely that “the only subjects of the mulatto world . . . have crossed through the real and imaginary geography of the greater Caribbean in search of freedom and escape” (p. 264), rests uncomfortably with his evidence.

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