In her useful addition to existing scholarship on mixed-race black literary and cultural representations, Lisa Ze Winters's The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic complicates discussions that have overwhelmingly focussed on a narrow view of such figures, most often in the antebellum “tragic-mulatta” trope. Winters joins an array of recent scholarship expanding this understanding of mixed-race figures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, by scholars including Jennifer DeVere Brody, Kimberly Snyder Manganelli, Teresa Zackodnik, and Eve Allegra Raimon.Footnote ¹ Winters's study of the figure she calls the “free(d) mulatta concubine” (while also interrogating each of these terms) is temporally and geographically ambitious, spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the black Atlantic world (2). This breadth of time and space illustrates this figure's ubiquity in transatlantic circulations of visual and written texts, as “a subject whose presence pervades African diasporic history” (2).

The free(d) mulatta concubine becomes not only prominent but central to understanding black diasporic intersectional identity as early as the eighteenth century. And yet Winters is keen to interrogate even her own centering of this figure in a theorization of African diaspora, recognizing the dangers of privileging mixed-race figures within colonial histories of antiblackness. Antiblackness must, in fact, be fully acknowledged in this figure whose “body is evidence of the racialized and sexualized trauma, the violence of white male desire, the geographic displacement, and, perhaps most importantly, the fractured and interdependent reproductions of kinship and capital so central to economies of American slavery” (14). Examining a wide range of literature around mixed-race figures, their racial identification, and their enslavability, Winters argues that “reading diaspora through the lens of the free(d) mulatta concubine demands a rethinking of the interrelated questions of origins, memory, terror, freedom, and evidence in the production of African diasporic subjectivity” (2). This figure's relation both to white patriarchal power and desire and to women of color's own desire and negotiation of colonial/slaveholding spaces informs her movement.

Emphasizing “the nonlinearity and multidimensionality of African diasporic geographies,” the book is structured accordingly, via comparative readings of texts from disparate contexts (21). Beyond readings of historical figures and literary characters, Winters also reads the free(d) mulatta concubine through the counterarchive of African diasporic religious practices in an opening chapter that anchors the book's arc. Winters begins by reading the free(d) mulatta concubine alongside the lwa (goddess) of Haitian religious vodou practice, Ezili Freda, in a relationship that suggests both echo and dissonance that “is emblematic of what it means to be in diaspora” and the free(d) mulatta concubine's “always-contingent but always-possible relationship to freedom and unfreedom” (66).

Winters's next two chapters trace the free(d) mulatta concubine's relationship with freedom and unfreedom via familiar topics: intimacy and family, through questions of what kinds of evidence the archive does and does not bear. Taking the headwraps worn by some African diasporic women as one example of freedom's relation to privacy and surveillance, Winters extends her discussion to questions about these women's desire and power. Similarly reading the archival invisibility of both free(d) men of color's and free(d) women of color's first-person narratives, Winters asks, “How does the archive of the free(d) mulatta concubine produce absences, and how might reading through these absences demand that we understand the experience of diaspora, so often cast as a collective experience, to be also the most intimate, private, and individual of practices?” (109). Finally, taking up the tension between the free(d) mulatta concubine's privilege and precariousness, Winters ends her study by discussing the limitations of mapping the free(d) mulatta concubine's diasporic echo, acknowledging what these readings of diaspora refuse to reveal.

Winters's methodological intervention is as significant as her more specific arguments. Building on the methodologies of Barbara Christian, VèVè Clark, and Colin Dyan, Winters's framing of African diasporic religious practice as an intellectual and spiritual practice of theorizing black histories and presents suggests “a counterparadigm, an alternative methodology for reading the archive” (19). The appearance of the free(d) mulatta concubine “illuminates the incoherence of diaspora” as Winters “mine[s] her archive not necessarily to produce a new narrative of diaspora but rather to see what else is there” (18). This intervention is fitting in the larger context of black studies’ historical and continued challenges to normative academic methodologies. Winters’s methodological framing will likely be useful to readers outside black studies, however. Explaining how her project “challenges how we scholars produce and recognize archival evidence,” Winters leaves room for methodological connections in other fields (3).