Contact Information |
Mixed Race Studies is produced and maintained by Steven F. Riley.
As a key figure of national and transnational desire, the mulata was famed for her corporal functions-sex and dance. Beginning in the 1970s, Brazilian governmental tourism agencies utilized the image of the sexually available mulata for the promotion of Brazil as a tourist destination. From the 1970s to the 1990s, white Rio de Janeiro businessman Oswaldo Sargentelli, a self-described mulatólogo (mulata expert), presented samba spectacles of scantily clad dancing women to the Brazilian elite and tourists alike. With the branding of brasilidade as a sexual paradise of mulatas, the archetype of the sensual sexually available mulata who dances with abandon became a thematic fixture memorialized in popular Brazilian cultural politics and in the international imagination. Jasmine Mitchell, "Sensual Not Beautiful: The Mulata as Erotic Spectacle," ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Spring 2017. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/sensual-not-beautiful. |
Contact Information |
Mixed Race Studies is produced and maintained by Steven F. Riley.