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WORK TITLE: The Mulatta Concubine
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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NATIONALITY:
http://africam.berkeley.edu/person/lisa-ze-winters * https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/bb4183
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015040000
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Winters, Lisa Ze
Found in: The mulatta concubine, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Lisa Ze Winters)
data view (Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at
Wayne State University)
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wayne State Univ.
website, June 25, 2015 (Lisa Ze Winters; Dept. of
English, Dept. of Africana Studies; Prof. Winters)
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PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, A.B., 1993, M.A., 1999, Ph.D., 2005.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Wayne State University, assistant professor of Africana Studies and English teacher.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Lisa Ze Winters studies, teaches, and writes about African American history, the African diaspora, and black feminist thought. She is assistant professor of Africana studies and an English teacher in the Departments of English and Africana Studies at Wayne State University. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in African American studies and a Ph.D. in African diaspora studies, all from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation covered “Specter, Spectacle and the Imaginative Space: Unfixing the Tragic Mulatta,” which she expanded into her first academic book, The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic, published in 2016.
Focusing on race and gender in the African diaspora created by the Atlantic slave trade, Ze Winters writes about free women of mixed black African and white ancestry who lived as concubines for white men. With free women of color being severely limited in social positions outside the slave environment, Ze Winters examines their relationship to other free people of color, the slave community, and free women living in slave ports. Drawing on various sources, such as political petitions, letters, newspapers, travelers’ narratives, and ethnographies, she highlights concepts of freedom, race, gender, genealogy, and geography in three Atlantic sites: Gorée Island, Senegal; New Orleans; and Saint-Domingue (Haiti).
“Ze Winters offers a vision of a global South that is neither static nor easy to characterize. She invites the reader in and asks such probing questions and offers such a fascinating analysis that we are left wanting more, in the best sense,” according to Jessica Millward in Journal of Southern History. Exploring the lives of women in the situation of being lovers and mistresses to white men, “Ze Winters is interested in what we know, do not know, and sometimes cannot know,” added Millward. She also noted that Ze Winters explores the traumas, desires, and even the magic that free black women possessed.
Mulatta concubines were often caught between two representations: seductive temptress or victim of rape. In presenting different representations of black women’s experiences, Ze Winters encourages discussion about the nature of historical evidence by focusing on three examples of free women of color: the real historical Marie Laveau, the famous nineteenth-century practitioner of religious Voodoo in New Orleans; the mythological Haitian goddess Ezili Freda; and the fictional composite character of an eighteenth-century Senegalese woman. Ze Winters delves into free black women’s perceptions about their own identity and how they were seen historically based on stereotypes and racial prejudice.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, 2017, Jessica Millward, review of The Mulatto Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic, p. 660.
ONLINE
Wayne State University, https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/ (February 1, 2017), author profile.
Associate Professor, African American Studies and English
lisaze@wayne.edu
5057 Woodward, #10411
Lisa Ze Winters
Research Interest/Area of Expertise
African American Literature; African Diaspora Studies; Black Feminist Thought
Education – Degrees, Licenses, Certifications
Ph.D., African Diaspora Studies University of California Berkeley, 2005
M.A., African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1999
A.B., African American Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1993
Selected Publications
The Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom and Desire in the Black Transatlantic (University of Georgia Press, 2016)
Currently Teaching
AFS/GSW 5110, Black Women in America, 3 credits, W17
ENG 3470, Survey of African American Literature, 3 credits, W17
About Lisa Ze Winters
Work
Wayne State University
Education
Universty of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Favorites
Other
Wayne State University English Department, Wayne State University Creative Writing, Source Booksellers, WSU Department of African American Studies, African American Studies at University of California, Berkeley, Son of Baldwin, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, The Black Bottom Archives
Wayne State University English...
Lisa Ze-Winters
Education:
B.A., University of California, Berkeley, African American Studies; M.A., University of California, Berkeley, African American Studies; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, African American Studies
Dissertation:
Specter, Spectacle and the Imaginative Space: Unfixing the Tragic Mulatta
Thesis Advisor:
VeVe Clark, Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Research Topic:
Transatlantic Currencies: Negotiating Fantasy, Power, and Blackness through the Visible Mulatta
Mentor:
Lindon Barrett, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine
Current Position:
Associate Professor, Departments of English and Africana Studies, Wayne State University
The Mulatto Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic
Jessica Millward
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p660+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
The Mulatto Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic. By Lisa Ze Winters. Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 222. $59.95, ISBN 978 0-8203-4896-4.)
Three personas converge in Lisa Ze Winters's interdisciplinary account of the experience of black women who fought to be self-possessed individuals in the world of Atlantic slavery: those who were "kept" by their white lovers as mistresses, those who fought for and maintained their free status, and those who were read through stereotype and mythology. Of these three personas, one, Marie Laveau, is historical; one, Ezili Freda, is mythological; and the third, an unnamed eighteenth-century Senegalese woman, is suppositional. Ze Winters culls a range of interdisciplinary sources, from primary historical documents to critical race theory, to accomplish the task of mapping the history of the mulatta concubine.
Ze Winters begins the introduction with an unnamed free African woman boarding a ship in 1728 on Goree Island, Senegal, destined for New Orleans. With a methodology reminiscent of that used by Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York. 2007), Ze Winters traces the route from Senegal, to Haiti, to New Orleans. The narrative in chapter 1 centers on the Haitian goddess Ezili. Ze Winters addresses many aspects of black women's experiences in the New World through the lens of the mythology of Ezili. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the intimate sexual experiences of black women, which existed on the range from terror to desire. Marie Laveau (a revered nineteenth-century practitioner of religious Voodoo in New Orleans) is presented as an "echo and mirror" to Ezili (p. 71). Laveau's presence in Ze Winters's work functions both on the level of myth and as historical evidence of an actual free woman of color. The third chapter centers on the themes of possession and kinship. To Ze Winters, it is within the space of kinship that free black women exerted their power--even if the very act of producing the family was a result of sexual terror. In chapter 4 Ze Winters addresses one of the key themes of diaspora--the issue of belonging and freedom--by focusing her observations on literary tracks of the time. When viewed together, the women discussed in these chapters function as diaspora echoes of the traumas, the desires, and indeed the magic that free black women possessed.
Ze Winters is part of a growing body of scholars who voice the challenges that researchers of the history of black women face in the absence of formal archival materials. Ze Winters's work interrogates the assumptions around the very term archive: what is included in the term? What is excluded from it? Ze Winters accomplishes her critique of the archive by, among other things, queering slavery and questioning whether the primary intimate relationship in the life of the mulatta concubine was actually with a white man, or rather with herself and other black diasporic women.
Were free black women ever accorded a place where their identity and perceptions about their identity were absent from stereotypes and racial prejudice? Ze Winters is interested in what we know, do not know, and sometimes cannot know about the inner lives of black women--the loss, the silence, the heartbreak, and the role of mythology in their self-concept.
Ze Winters offers a vision of a global South that is neither static nor easy to characterize. She invites the reader in and asks such probing questions and offers such a fascinating analysis that we are left wanting more, in the best sense. The book ends where it begins, at Goree Island. Ze Winters suggests that we rethink the circumstances of the unnamed woman who boarded the boat. The question is not what the free black woman was running toward or what she was leaving behind. Ze Winters invites us to imagine the history that can be found in sources beyond the archive.
Jessica Millward
University of California, Irvine
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Millward, Jessica. "The Mulatto Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 660+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078121/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=fa36d747. Accessed 25 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078121