Imagining the Mulatta

Abstract

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media demonstrates how mixed-race women of African and European descent are harnessed in popular media as a tool to uphold white supremacy and discipline people of African descent to uphold state policies of antiblackness. Uncovering the racialized and gendered paradigms of U.S. and Brazilian media, the book uses case studies of texts from a broad range of popular culture media—film, telenovelas, television shows, music videos, magazines, newspapers, and Olympic ceremonies—to elucidate how the U.S. mulatta and Brazilian mulata figures operates within and across the United States and Brazil as a response to racial anxieties and notions of white superiority. These shared concepts of race, gender, and sexuality crystallize in the mulatta/mulata figure as representative of interlinked racial projects in Brazil and the United States. Focusing on popular culture and political events of the 2000s, the book demonstrates how the mulatta and mulata figures facilitated multicultural and postracial discourses. Exploring representations, definitions, and meanings of blackness in the context of the Americas, the book traverses the cultural conditions of racializations in the United States alongside Brazil to unveil the workings of pervasive racial and gender inequalities.