An Octoroon Review
An Octoroon
An Octoroon

An Octoroon
Written by	Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Date premiered	23 April 2014
Place premiered	Soho Rep New York City, New York, United States
Original language	English
Genre	Melodrama
Setting	A black box, and Louisiana

An Octoroon is a play written by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. It is an adaptation of Dion Boucicault'sThe Octoroon, which premiered in 1859. Jacobs-Jenkins reframes Boucicault's play using its original characters and plot, speaking much of Boucicault's dialogue, and critiques its portrayal of race using Brechtian devices.^[1] Jacobs-Jenkins considers An Octoroon and his other works Appropriate and Neighbors linked in the exploration of theatre, genre, and how theatre interacts with questions of identity, along with how these questions (such as 'Why do we think of a social issue as something that can be solved?') transform as a part of life.^[2] In a 2018 poll by critics of The New York Times, the work was ranked the second-greatest American play of the past 25 years.^[3]

Characters and casting

Guillaume Guillon-Lethière was the son of a Frenchman and a mulâtresse (female mulatto) from Guadeloupe.

In the slave societies of the Americas, a quadroon or quarteron was a person with one quarter African and three quarters European ancestry (or in Australia, one quarter aboriginal ancestry).

Similar classifications were octoroon for one-eighth black (Latin root octo-, means 'eight') and hexadecaroon for one-sixteenth black.

Below are excerpts taken from the HowlRound article, 'Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon' by Holly Derr. Also, scroll down for a plot summary of THE OCTOROON. Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, first presented in New York in 1859, bears more than a striking resemblance to its better-known stage sister, George Aiken’s adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle.
Octoroon definition, a person having one-eighth Black ancestry, with one Black great-grandparent; the offspring of a quadroon and a white person.
AN OCTOROON Time Out New York Despite the moments of palpable fear and disquiet, the audience leaves feeling somehow healthier, as though the theater has given us a violent shake and a pep talka tremendously exciting production, moving and chilling and surprising at once.

Governments of the time sometimes incorporated the terms in law, defining rights and restrictions. The use of such terminology is a characteristic of hypodescent, which is the practice within a society of assigning children of mixed unions to the ethnic group which the dominant group perceives as being subordinate.^[1] The racial designations refer specifically to the number of full-blooded African ancestors or equivalent, emphasizing the quantitative least, with quadroon signifying that a person has one-quarter black ancestry.

The Octoroon is a play by Dion Boucicault that opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City. Extremely popular, the play was kept running continuously for years by seven road companies. Among antebellum melodramas, it was considered second in popularity only to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

Etymology[edit]

The word quadroon was borrowed from the French quarteron and the Spanish cuarterón, both of which have their root in the Latin quartus, meaning 'a quarter'.

Similarly the Spanish cognatecuarterón is used to describe cuarterón de mulato or morisco (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter black) and cuarterón de mestizo or castizo, (someone whose racial origin is three-quarters white and one-quarter Indian), especially in Caribbean South America.^[2]

'De español y mulata: morisca'. Painting; 1763 by Miguel Cabrera, México.

Racial classifications[edit]

Quadroon was used to designate a person of one-quarter African/Aboriginal ancestry, that is equivalent to one biracial parent (African/Aboriginal and Caucasian) and one white or European parent; in other words, the equivalent of one African/Aboriginal grandparent and three White or European grandparents.^[3] In Latin America, which had a variety of terms for racial groups, some terms for quadroons were morisco or chino, see casta.

The term mulatto was used to designate a person who was biracial, with one fully black parent and one fully white parent, or a person whose parents are both mulatto.^[3] In some cases, it was used as a general term, for instance on US census classifications, to refer to all persons of mixed race, without regard for proportion of ancestries. Tony kart serial numbers.

The term octoroon referred to a person with one-eighth African/Aboriginal ancestry;^[4] that is, someone with family heritage equivalent to one biracial grandparent; in other words, one African great-grandparent and seven European great-grandparents. An example was Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. As with the use of quadroon, this word was applied to a limited extent in Australia for those of one-eighth Aboriginal ancestry, as the government implemented assimilation policies on the Stolen generation.

Terceron was a term synonymous with octoroon, derived from being three generations of descent from an African ancestor (great-grandparent).^[5] The term mustee was also used to refer to a person with one-eighth African ancestry.

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The term sacatra was used to refer to one who was seven-eighths black or African and one-eighth white or European (i.e. an individual with one black and one griffe parent, or one white great-grandparent).^[6]

Parallels desktop 9 for mac serial key generator & activation. The term mustefino refers to a person with one-sixteenth African ancestry.^[3] The terms quintroon or hexadecaroon were also used.

Thomas-Alexandre Dumas: mulatto

Alexandre Dumas, père: quadroon

An Octoroon Review

An Octoroon

Alexandre Dumas, fils: octoroon

In the French Antilles, the following terms were used^[7]^[8]^[9] during the 18th century:

Black ancestry	Saint-Domingue	Guadeloupe/Martinique
7/8	Sacatra	-
3/4	Griffe	Capre
5/8	Marabou	-
1/2	Mulâtre	Mulâtre
1/4	Quarteron	Métis
1/8	Métis	Quarteron
1/16	Mamelouk	Mamelouk
1/32	Quarteronné	-
1/64	Sang-mêlé	-

In Latin America, the terms griffe or sambo were sometimes used for an individual of three-quarters black parentage, i.e. the child of a mulatto parent and a fully black parent.^[3]

Depiction in media[edit]

In the pre-war period, mixed-race slaves with predominantly white features were depicted in photos and other media to show whites that some slaves were visually indistinguishable from themselves, thus preventing them from seeing slaves as an ethnic 'other' in order to further the abolition movement.

An Octoroon

See also[edit]

Discrimination based on skin color a.k.a. Colo