Images of women of mixed African and European descent have figured prominently in representations of national belonging and social identities in the Americas. Jasmine Mitchell places these images within a hemispheric framework that highlights the United States’ and Brazil's shared histories of colonization, slavery, and anti-Blackness. Without neglecting the significant differences in the systems of racial and gender classification that characterize Brazilian and US contexts, Mitchell highlights how the mulatta (or mulata in Brazil) has generated significant tensions and anxieties about the place of Blackness in the Americas.

The book presents a systematic and in-depth analysis of a wide range of media representations of the mulatta/mulata in both Brazil and the United States, with a focus on the first decade of the 2000s. One of the strengths of Mitchell's analysis is the way in which she connects contemporary cultural productions to a prolonged history of eroticization and exploitation of mixed-Black female bodies. Chapter 1 examines the historical contours of the mixed-race woman in the Americas and historical legacies from colonial myths about the seductive social-climbing mulatta to more recent celebrations of, and anxieties about, racial mixing.

This study includes close and insightful textual analyses of contemporary representations of mulatta figures. Chapter 2 examines the celebrity status and significance of actors Jennifer Beals and Halle Berry in the United States and Camila Pitanga in Brazil. They are mixed-race women who are often presented as embodiments of racial progress and exotic desire. Chapter 3 examines representations of the mulata in Brazilian telenovelas (serial melodramas), with a focus on Pitanga's performances in Belíssima and Paraíso Tropical. Chapter 4 focuses on the performances of Berry and Beals in, respectively, the movie Monster's Ball and the television series The L World. Even though these celebrities push back against notions of monolithic Blackness, Mitchell demonstrates that media conglomerates and neoliberal sensibilities promote the commodification and fetishization of mixed-race bodies by reinscribing them back to racial, gender, and sexual tropes that normalize whiteness and reinforce anti-Blackness. The first four chapters represent the core of Mitchell's important contributions to research on the cultural and political significance of the mulatta figure.

Chapters 5 and 6 broaden the scope of analysis by including a variety of cultural products, including music videos by Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams, and will.i.am, the action movie Fast Five, and the strategies deployed by the Brazilian state to promote the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Even though these chapters showcase again Mitchell's strong analytical skills, they lack focus in relation to the central theme of women of mixed African and European descent. For example, the female protagonist of Fast Five is white, rather than mulatta, and it is not always clear how Chapters 5 and 6 advance the strong foundation laid by the first four chapters.

Despite a relative overinterpretation of cultural products and genres, this book presents robust scholarly contributions. Mitchell demonstrates how the eroticized mixed-Black female body has been historically deployed to buttress white supremacy and discipline people of African descent. The book also sheds new light on the role of racial and gender hierarchies in recent political shifts in both Brazil and the United States, including the rise of far-right outsiders Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. For example, in her excellent chapter on Brazilian telenovelas, Mitchell argues that TV representations of the mulata demonstrate an early backlash against increased opportunities for Afro-descendants, as expressed by the rise of affirmative action programs for Blacks and mixed-race Brazilians in public universities. Such early backlash would become open and explicit with the rise of a conservative mass movement after 2013 and the election of Bolsonaro in 2018. These and other insights make this book an obligatory resource to any scholar interested in the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in the Americas.