Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.9.2.0273
• Pages: 273204-275
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017
• Author: Delia Neyra Tercero

BOOK REVIEWS 273

IJCS Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals www.plutojournals.com/ijcs/

Melissa Blanco Borelli, She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) pb 204pp. ISBN: 9780199968176

Reviewed by Delia Neyra Tercero

She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body follows the history of the emblem-

atic figure of the Cuban mulata and reclaims her body from a male patriarchal gaze

used mainly for pleasure and objectification to a site of identity making potential-

ity. The mulata’s hips serve as the focal point through which the mulata is able to

wield power, pleasure and the production of subjectivity for herself. Broad in scope,

Blanco Borelli offers three historical periods from which she frames her analysis.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, Borelli examines the mulatas who partook in

the libidinal economy of white Cuban or European males who sought mulata mis-

tresses in the social dance spaces of Havana and briefly in the quadroon balls in

New Orleans. The second historical instalment composes an examination of the

nightlife spaces of the academias de baile in Havana and representations of

the dancing mulata brand in various films. Last, the third historical moment traces

the trajectory of the mulata body from 1970 to the 1990s through the emergence

of the despelote dance within the context of the Cuban Revolution, delineating how

her body continued to gain agency despite the discourse of the mujer revolucionaria

as an agent in carrying out the Revolution’s nation making objectives.

Situated in a space in between whiteness and blackness and a product of

European, indigenous and African miscegenation, the narrative of the tragic

mulata arose in nineteenth-century literature, drama and visual culture. It is

through her embodiment and performances that the mulata surpasses the trope

of tragedy and gains ‘an opportunity for self-authorship, pleasure and discursive

contestation’ (7). Blanco Borelli thus makes a valuable contribution to the field of

Dance and Performance Studies through her theorization of the hips titled ‘hip(g)

nosis’ in which the mulata’s body is presented as ‘an intelligent, powerful materi-

ality that can (re)write history, comment on social-political situations, and ques-

tion the construction of its identity and bodily inscriptions’ (14). As the mulata’s

hips move in a circular motion, she redefines time, gains her own pleasure from

it and finds agency in her dance, moving her body as she pleases. Consequently,

her body becomes an active, mobile and vital meaning-making entity. Instead of

perceived as a site of sexual objectification and moral degeneration from a hege-

monic standpoint, Borelli redefines the hips as the location from which the mulata

dances not only for self-empowerment, pleasure, negotiation and power

exchanges, but also her dance functions as way to re-historicise the mulata lived

experience and significance in the circum-Atlantic area (31). In this act, she

also salvages the sacred nature of the hips from an African tradition, in this way