A revelatory account that places mulatto experience at the center of Caribbean history.
This ambitious book brings to light the story of what José F. Buscaglia-Salgado terms mulataje-the ways
Caribbean aesthetics offer the possibility of the ultimate erasure of racial difference. Undoing Empire gives a
broad panorama stretching from the complex politics of medieval Iberian societies to the beginning of direct U.S.
hegemony in the Caribbean at the end of the nineteenth century.
Buscaglia-Salgado begins with an examination of Washington Irving's "American Columbiad" as an act of
historical and territorial plundering. He then traces the roots of mulatto society to the pre-1492 Iberian world,
not only finding a connection between the Moors of "Old Spain" and the morenos-the blacks and mulattos
of the New World-but also offering a profound critique of creole and imperial discourses. Buscaglia-Salgado reads
the pursuit and contestation of what he terms the European Ideal in colonial texts, architecture, and paintings;
then identifies the mulatto movement of "undoing" the Ideal in the wars that shook the nineteenth-century
Caribbean from Haiti to Cuba, arguing that certain projects of national liberation have moved contrary to the historical
claims to freedom in the mulatto world.
Table of Contents
1. Tales of the Alhambra: Washington Irving and the Immaculate Conception of America
2. Contesting the Ideal: From the Moors of Hispania to the Morenos of Hispaniola
3. Bartolome de Las Casas at the End of Time; or, How the Indies Were Won and Lost
4. The Creole in His Labyrinth: The Disquieting Order of the Being Unbecoming
5. Undoing the Ideal: The Life and Passion of the Mulatto
6. Moors in Heaven: A Second Columbus and the Return of the Zaharenian Curse
