A case of hip(g)nosis: An epistemology of the mulata body and her revolutionary hips

This dissertation examines the literary trope of the "tragic" mulata and argues that there is no such thing as tragedy when an active corpo-real uses her hips, to claim territory, citizenship, and socio-cultural agency. Using the Yoruba energetic quality deified as Osun and her cultural transformations in Cuba as a guide, metaphor, and theory enables an exploration of the bodily representations of the hip(ped) mulata, or corpo-mulata. Informed by my background in theories of the body, dance studies, and the politics of cultural studies, corpo-mulata developed as a response to the textuality of the "mulata." "Mulata" exists as a passive figure, a national icon, a literary confabulation, and a stable signifier of an uncomplicated hybridity, yet "mulata" has a cultural life. Corpo-mulata becomes the corporeal performative that, along with queries into the history of the Americas, Africanist cosmology, the role bodies have as meaning makers, and the (re)invention of culture, provides an alternative to the mulata figure as merely tragic.;My idea of corpo-mulata emerges from a hagiographic tendency in Cuban nationalism, one that bestows honor, adoration, and veneration to the corporeal representation of a hybrid nation. A genealogical excavation of not just the sign of "mulata," but of the flesh of those consumed by her iconography reveals a lucid and eloquent feminine language. The mulata's body obtains value simply by being perceived as a hybridized body. Her skin's ability to both assert and insert value, and eventually humanity, onto an African descended body renders her bodily presence into a laboring force, regardless of her actual physical labor. I focus on Cuba where mulatas, and corpo-mulatas, carry the specter of Osun (Ochun as anthropomorphized in the Cuban cultural imaginary) on their bodies and their material productions: laborless, her body mobilizes itself for itself, in particular of its hips.