A Taste for Honey: Choreographing the Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance Film
International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media
Volume 5, Numbers 2 and 3 (December 2009)
pages 141-153
Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey
This article examines the filmic representations of the mulatta body in the films Sparkle (1976), Flashdance (1983) and Honey (2003). More specifically, this article seeks to unravel how the Hollywood filmic apparatus engages with signifiers of raced sexuality and hierarchies of dance styles to enforce and reify mythic narratives about dance, dancing raced bodies and dance-making. By establishing a genealogy of the mulatta body in a US context through dance and/or performance films, these juxtapositions illustrate how the mulatta subject develops from a tragic figure (in Sparkle) to an independent and self-reliant one (in Honey). Critical dance studies provide the analytical framework by allowing a focus on particular choreographed and improvised dance sequences performed by each film’s respective mulatta protagonist.
The figure of the mulatta colours many cultural imaginaries with her specific narratives. One such narrative, the trope of the ‘tragic mulatta’ appears prominently, often obfuscating any other type of representation possible. As Hazel Carby writes, ‘the figure of the mulatt[a] should be understood and analysed as a narrative device of mediation’(1987:88), mediating between the white and black worlds said figure straddles. Couched in Enlightenment ideologies of race, the mulatta emerges as a tragic figure in that her genesis occurs from a violent union between two races — a ‘dominant white’ one, and a ‘subservient black’ one. Werner Sollors explains the etymology of the word mulatto:
of sixteenth century Spanish origin, documented in English since 1595, and designating a child of a black and a white parent, was long considered etymologically derived from ‘mule’; yet it may also come from the Arabic word muwallad (meaning “Mestizo” or mixed) (1999:128).
Even with skin that approximates ‘whiteness,’ the proverbial ‘taint’ or ‘drop’ of impure African blood condemns her and her value to be less than human, despite the fascination with her representation of ambiguity and varying skin colour gradations. The undervalued ‘figment of [the concept of] pigment’(1998:16) as DeVere Brody calls it, conversely added to her value as a popular sexual commodity for heterosexual male desire. As a filmic presence, the mulatta first appeared in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). Lydia, the mulatta mistress of the white abolitionist carpetbagger, appears independent, powerful, threatening, yet desirable. Film historian Donald Bogle attributes this connection between ‘the light-skinned Negress’ (2001:15) and desirability to a closer proximity to a white aesthetic ideal which gave ‘cinnamon-colored gals’ (2001:15) a chance at lead parts. Other films such as Imitation of Life (1934; 1959), Pinky (1949), Shadows (1959), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) utilize the trope of the mulatta and render her full of regret, emotionally unfulfilled, or sad and alone due to each film’s respective circumstances. As Charles Scruggs states, ‘the mulatta is a visible expression of the broken taboo, a figure bearing witness to the interconnection of the races, and the “site of the hybridity of histories”’ (2004:327). Fraught between desire, melancholy, and despair, the mulatta usually encounters a tragic fate, unable to escape these pre-scripted choreographies of her race. These characterizations prevent more complex representations of this racialised and gendered body primarily by constricting the notion of mulatta into narratives based on textual discursive practices. As a result, the mulatta figure suffers from rather limited representations unable to acknowledge her potentiality as something other than tragic.
In this article, I seek to vivify and corpo-realize mulatta representations by particularly focusing on films where mulattas use their bodies, specifically their hips in active mobilizations as performers, dancers, or choreographers. As I have argued elsewhere, my theory of hip(g)nosis exposes the contours of the hip as a site of cultural production, produced and deployed by historically racialized mulatta bodies in their negotiation of ‘blackness,’ ‘whiteness,’ the political economy of pleasure, and becoming. As a result, the excesses of the hip’s choreography, its existence as a product that can dazzle, dodge, divert and, of course, hip-notize locates it as/in a space where the enacting mulatta body achieves some agency through the different values imposed on it.
Thinking through and moving with the mulatta’s hip, I will examine the filmic representations of the mulatta body in the Hollywood film Honey (2003) starring Jessica Alba. More specifically, this article aims to unravel how the Hollywood filmic apparatus engages with signifiers of raced sexuality and hierarchies of dance styles to enforce and reify mythic narratives about dance, dancing raced bodies, and dance-making. In order to frame the discussion of how the mulatta body operates through the visual economy, I will establish a genealogy of this body in a U.S. context through two other dance/performance films: Sparkle (1976) and Flashdance (1983). These juxtapositions illustrate how the mulatta subject develops from a tragic figure (in Sparkle) to independent and self-reliant (in Honey) with dance acting as the analytical framework by focusing on particular choreographed and ‘improvised’ dance sequences performed by each film’s respective mulatta protagonist…
Read the entire article here.