This study will examine Alejo Carpentier's novel The Kingdom of This World, focusing on the role of miscegenation in both biological and cultural senses. The study will focus on the racism inherent in the nation examined by Carpentier and in the relationships between whites and blacks. However, the book is hardly a portrayal of blacks as all-good and whites as all-evil. To the contrary, Carpentier portrays almost every character as significantly flawed, although he clearly means to indict the system of slavery, blatant or de facto, which prevails in the nation he portrays.
The issue of miscegenation is basically one of control and domination. In other words, the race in control will control the interrelationships of blacks and whites. In a nation controlled by whites, blacks will be treated as secondary citizens at best, slaves at worst, and will accordingly be seen as sexual and cultural playthings. On the other hand, if and when blacks take over political power from the whites who had been exploiting and abusing them, the tables are likely to be turned and both sexual and cultural exploitation may occur with blacks instead of whites in control.
In Carpentier's book, the reader finds numerous examples of how miscegenation, both biological and cultural, is shaped and controlled by the powers-that-be. Miscegenation and the way it is worked out in society in the book is a matter of the exercise of such power, The book opens with a scene in which the expertise of a black man with respect to the worth of horses is featured. This expertise benefits the white man who owns the black man, Ti Noel, and who will shortly own the horse the slave picked out. The owner of the slave and of the horse is most eager to use both to his full advantage, but he would no sooner teach Ti Noel to read than he would the horse. In fact, he would more likely teach the horse to read, because an educated slave is precisely what white slaveowners did not wa...