The Kingdom of this World

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 ma

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effect, being "raped" by the powerful and mysterious "poisons" of the black culture. The biological, or sexual, control of blacks is mentioned for the first time in an almost off-handed way by the author: Between indecent songs and sharpers' tricks and fondling the Negresses' breasts as they brought in clean glasses, [the soldiers] recounted the feats of grandfathers who had taken part in the sack of Cartagena or had lined their pockets with the treasures of the Spanish Crown (40-41). In other words, the white men so take for granted their position of power over blacks that their sexual abuse of black women is merely a small part of their nightly revelry. The fact that the author has these white men recounting their grandfathers' exploits is telling; those exploits of victory over others and stealing the goods of the vanquished mirrors their own practice of slavery. Once again, Carpentier drives home the message that the control of the vanquished by the victor results in a sexual as well as cultural miscegenation which is controlled and defined by the victor. Still, because the white man fears the black culture, and seeks to contain it and castrate it instead of understand and appreciate it, the culture of the black man

Category: Literature - T