A novel by an African American woman yet to be discovered.

In this broadly conceived exploration of how people represent identity in the Americas, Suzanne Bost argues that mixture has been central to the definition of race in the United States, Mexico, and the Caribbean since the nineteenth century. Her study is particularly relevant in an era that promotes mixed-race musicians, actors, sports heroes, and supermodels as icons of a "new" America. Bost challenges the popular media's notion that a new millennium has ushered in a radical transformation of American ethnicity; in fact, this paradigm of the "changing" face of America extends throughout American history. Working from literary and historical accounts of mulattas, mestizas, and creoles, Bost analyzes a tradition, dating from the nineteenth century, of theorizing identity in terms of racial and sexual mixture. By examining racial politics in Mexico and the United States; racially mixed female characters in Anglo-American, African American, and Latina narratives; and ideas of mixture in the Caribbean, she ultimately reveals how the fascination with mixture often corresponds to racial segregation, sciences of purity, and white supremacy. The racism at the foundation of many nineteenth-century writings encourages Bost to examine more closely the subtexts of contemporary writings on the "browning" of America. Original and ambitious in scope, Mulattas and Mestizas measures contemporary representations of mixed-race identity in the United States against the history of mixed-race identity in the Americas. It warns us to be cautious of the current, millennial celebration of mixture in popular culture and identity studies, which may, contrary to all appearances, mask persistent racism and nostalgia for purity.

“Ex-Centric Souths: (Re)Imagining Southern Centers and Peripheries” adds a voice in ongoing attempts to chart new routes and to decenter the South in many ways in the hope of exploring Southern identity and multiple Souths. The articles collected in this volume bring to the forefront the translocal and transnational connections and relationships between the South and the circum-Caribbean region; they address the changing nature of Southernness, and especially its sense of place, and finally they investigate the potential of various texts to narrate and revisit regional concerns. Some contributions hold up to view topics ignored and marginalized, while other decontextualize themes and issues central to Southern studies by telling alternative histories.

Identifying the antebellum era in the United States as a transitional setting, Imagining Southern Spaces ́investigates spatialization processes about the South during a time when intensifying debates over the abolition of slavery led to a heightened period of (re)spatialization in the region. Taking the question of abolition as a major factor that shaped how different actors responded to these processes, this book studies spatial imaginations in a selection of abolitionist and proslavery literature of the era. Through this diversity of imaginations, the book points to a multitude of Souths in various economic, political, and cultural entanglements in the American Hemisphere and the Circumatlantic. Thus, it challenges monolithic and provincial representations of the South as a provincial region distinct from the rest of the country.