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Intimate Partner Violence in New Orleans: Gender, Race, and Reform, 1840–1900 examines the shifting nature of gender, race, and intimate partner violence in New Orleans—a place dramatically affected by countless social and cultural changes during six decades that encompassed the end of American slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the new and oppressive racial order that ushered in the twentieth century. The work utilizes documentation contained in local and state court cases to make new arguments about gender representation, legal reform, and the changing ways in which intimate partner violence was practiced and controlled and sanctioned and prohibited. It offers new insight to regional distinctiveness the South and race played into cultural and legal practices.

In 1833 Maria W. Stewart told a gathering at the African Masonic Hall on Boston’s Beacon Hill, “African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States.” She held that the founding principles of the United States must extend to all people, otherwise they are merely the hypocritical expression of an ungodly white power. This first-ever biography of a profoundly significant writer explores her early life as an indentured servant in Hartford, Connecticut. Later, she defied adversity, journeying to Boston where she met and married a wealthy commercial agent and former seaman and became a powerful force within the lively black community on Beacon Hill’s North Slope. Between 1831-1833 Stewart’s “intellectual productions” ranged across topics including true emancipation for African Americans, abolition, the hypocrisy of white Christianity, black liberation theology, and gender inequity. Along with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, (1829), her body of work constitutes a significant foundation for black radical politics.

Mulata Nation traces the figure of the mulata, the woman of mixed racial heritage in Cuban artwork and performance from the colonial era through the modern to the contemporary. While perhaps most widely linked with sensuality and sexual desirability, the mulata also serves as the embodiment of Cuba’s spirituality, and as emblematic of Cuban identity. Through close readings of representations of the mulata in fine and graphic art, mulata performers and the performance of mulata characters at distinct historical and ideological moments, the book claims that far from being a static, flat figure, images of the mulata have shifted over time and continue to find new expressions. Different expressions of the mulata are linked to specific historical moments. Representations of the mulata on cigarette packaging, marquillas cigarreras, and in the musical theater form zarzuela of the late colonial era, cabaret performance, fine art and popular magazine covers during the Republic, as an icon of Mexican cinema in the first wave of the diaspora of Cuban artists and Cuban cultural forms, and as an icon of the new (wo)man of revolutionary Cuba in Cuban cinema of the 1960s and 70s all figure the mulata as crucial figures in national culture. At present, both the significant diaspora of Cuban artists and others to the US and other countries have been re-inscribing the mulata and mulataje to bear, contest and sometimes reinforce the tropic positions explored in previous chapters. Furthermore, the performance of mulataje on and off the island is no longer limited to women; the performance of mulataje is prominent in highly popular drag shows and film in contemporary Cuba.