Imagining the Mulatta : Blackness in U.S. And Brazilian Media

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. Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representation—all the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates. Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an "acceptable" version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable blackness while maintaining the qualities that serve as outlets for interracial desire. | Cover TItle Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Foundations of the Mulata and Mulatta in the United States and Brazil 2. Framing Blackness and Mixedness: The Politics of Racial Identity in the Celebrity Texts of Jennifer Beals, Halle Berry, and Camila Pitanga 3. The Morena and the Mulata in Brazilian Telenovelas: Containing Blackness in a Racial Democracy 4. Reinventing the Mulatta in the United States for the 2000s: Celebrating Diversity amid the Haunting of Blackness 5. Remixing Mixedness: U.S. Media Imaginings of Brazil and Brazil's Bid for Rio 2016 Epilogue Notes Index Back cover | "An important and very readable work on the comparative histories and visual cultural formations of race and mixed race in Brazil and the United States."—Camilla Fojas, author of Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture "Jasmine Mitchell deftly illuminates how mixed-race performers, characters and television and film narratives in Brazil and the United States, presumably indicative of increasingly colorblind and multicultural nations, conversely play a dynamic role in the management of national identities and racial imaginaries."—Mary Beltrán, author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom | Jasmine Mitchell is an assistant professor of American studies and media and communication at SUNY Old Westbury. 'Imagining the Mulatta' 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 text 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