“¿Y ahora qué vas a hacer, mulata?”: Hip choreographies in the Mexican cabaretera film Mulata (1954)

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2012-03-29 22:47Z by Steven

“¿Y ahora qué vas a hacer, mulata?”: Hip choreographies in the Mexican cabaretera film Mulata (1954)

Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 18, Issue 3, November 2008
Special Issue: Sensualidades: Sounds and Movement in Latina/o Culture
pages 215-233
DOI: 10.1080/07407700802495951

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

This essay examines the film Mulata (Martínez Solares 1954) starring Cuban vedette Ninón Sevilla through the various performances of mulata identity featured in the film. By introducing the theory of hip(g)nosis and the sentience corpo-mulata, these theoretical models demonstrate how a body racialized as mulata choreographs identity through gestures, bodily articulations, and socio-historically inscribed movement repertoires associated with this particular corporeality. The development of these terms intends to show the complexities that bodies add to history, as well as their impact on cultural production and notions of territoriality, nationalism and citizenship. These terms also highlight the pleasure, sensuality and affect involved in identity construction. Finally, by providing examples of these theories through a close reading of Ninón Sevilla’s performances of the title character in the film Mulata, the essay provides a way to rethink the mulata as something other than “tragic.”

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A Taste for Honey: Choreographing the Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance Film

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2012-03-29 03:00Z by Steven

A Taste for Honey: Choreographing the Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance Film

International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media
Volume 5, Numbers 2 and 3 (December 2009)
pages 141-153

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

This article examines the filmic representations of the mulatta body in the films Sparkle (1976), Flashdance (1983) and Honey (2003). More specifically, this article seeks to unravel how the Hollywood filmic apparatus engages with signifiers of raced sexuality and hierarchies of dance styles to enforce and reify mythic narratives about dance, dancing raced bodies and dance-making. By establishing a genealogy of the mulatta body in a US context through dance and/or performance films, these juxtapositions illustrate how the mulatta subject develops from a tragic figure (in Sparkle) to an independent and self-reliant one (in Honey). Critical dance studies provide the analytical framework by allowing a focus on particular choreographed and improvised dance sequences performed by each film’s respective mulatta protagonist.

The figure of the mulatta colours many cultural imaginaries with her specific narratives. One such narrative, the trope of the ‘tragic mulatta’ appears prominently, often obfuscating any other type of representation possible. As Hazel Carby writes, ‘the figure of the mulatt[a] should be understood and analysed as a narrative device of mediation’(1987:88), mediating between the white and black worlds said figure straddles. Couched in Enlightenment ideologies of race, the mulatta emerges as a tragic figure in that her genesis occurs from a violent union between two races — a ‘dominant white’ one, and a ‘subservient black’ one. Werner Sollors explains the etymology of the word mulatto:

of sixteenth century Spanish origin, documented in English since 1595, and designating a child of a black and a white parent, was long considered etymologically derived from ‘mule’; yet it may also come from the Arabic word muwallad (meaning “Mestizo” or mixed) (1999:128).

Even with skin that approximates ‘whiteness,’ the proverbial ‘taint’ or ‘drop’ of impure African blood condemns her and her value to be less than human, despite the fascination with her representation of ambiguity and varying skin colour gradations. The undervalued ‘figment of [the concept of] pigment’(1998:16) as DeVere Brody calls it, conversely added to her value as a popular sexual commodity for heterosexual male desire. As a filmic presence, the mulatta first appeared in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). Lydia, the mulatta mistress of the white abolitionist carpetbagger, appears independent, powerful, threatening, yet desirable. Film historian Donald Bogle attributes this connection between ‘the light-skinned Negress’ (2001:15) and desirability to a closer proximity to a white aesthetic ideal which gave ‘cinnamon-colored gals’ (2001:15) a chance at lead parts. Other films such as Imitation of Life (1934; 1959), Pinky (1949), Shadows (1959), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) utilize the trope of the mulatta and render her full of regret, emotionally unfulfilled, or sad and alone due to each film’s respective circumstances. As Charles Scruggs states, ‘the mulatta is a visible expression of the broken taboo, a figure bearing witness to the interconnection of the races, and the “site of the hybridity of histories”’ (2004:327). Fraught between desire, melancholy, and despair, the mulatta usually encounters a tragic fate, unable to escape these pre-scripted choreographies of her race. These characterizations prevent more complex representations of this racialised and gendered body primarily by constricting the notion of mulatta into narratives based on textual discursive practices. As a result, the mulatta figure suffers from rather limited representations unable to acknowledge her potentiality as something other than tragic.

In this article, I seek to vivify and corpo-realize mulatta representations by particularly focusing on films where mulattas use their bodies, specifically their hips in active mobilizations as performers, dancers, or choreographers. As I have argued elsewhere, my theory of hip(g)nosis exposes the contours of the hip as a site of cultural production, produced and deployed by historically racialized mulatta bodies in their negotiation of ‘blackness,’ ‘whiteness,’ the political economy of pleasure, and becoming. As a result, the excesses of the hip’s choreography, its existence as a product that can dazzle, dodge, divert and, of course, hip-notize locates it as/in a space where the enacting mulatta body achieves some agency through the different values imposed on it.

Thinking through and moving with the mulatta’s hip, I will examine the filmic representations of the mulatta body in the Hollywood film Honey (2003) starring Jessica Alba. More specifically, this article aims to unravel how the Hollywood filmic apparatus engages with signifiers of raced sexuality and hierarchies of dance styles to enforce and reify mythic narratives about dance, dancing raced bodies, and dance-making. In order to frame the discussion of how the mulatta body operates through the visual economy, I will establish a genealogy of this body in a U.S. context through two other dance/performance films: Sparkle (1976) and Flashdance (1983). These juxtapositions illustrate how the mulatta subject develops from a tragic figure (in Sparkle) to independent and self-reliant (in Honey) with dance acting as the analytical framework by focusing on particular choreographed and ‘improvised’ dance sequences performed by each film’s respective mulatta protagonist…

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Vogue Italia and Hoop Earrings

Posted in Articles, Caribbean/Latin America, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Slavery, United States, Women on 2012-03-29 02:38Z by Steven

Vogue Italia and Hoop Earrings

Havana Barbie’s thought on the arts
2011-08-23

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

I have always loved to wear hoop earrings. In fact, they are my earrings of choice. Big and silver, that’s how I like them. Imagine my surprise and shock when I saw earrings I have always called hoop earrings called “Slave Earrings” by Italian Vogue. Really? Slave earrings? Vogue wants to link an ornamental accessory, a mark of indulgent aestheticism to a historically denigrated body that did not have the choice or power to choose how to look, let alone what to do? Even more appalling was the text (which has since been removed so as “not to offend” and are now called “ethnic earrings” … sigh):
 
“Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops. If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.”
 
I want to focus on the phrase “the decorative traditions of the women of colour.” Woman of colour is a charged label, especially when connected to the legacy of slavery, miscegenation, and sexual peccadilloes not just in the US South, but in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean as well. Historically, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century woman of colour meant creole, métisse, passe-blanc, mulatta, or mulattresse, i.e., the mixed race woman who was black… but not quite. With her many names and pigments, the woman of colour and “her decorative traditions” in the southern United States is often problematically romanticized through the stories of the quadroon balls of New Orleans where wealthy white men attended in search of sexual relationships. These women of colour negotiated liaisons called plaçage which were economically beneficial for themselves and their extended, often matrilineal family. Many of these women of colour were free and some even owned slaves…

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