Interracial Sex Research Articles

Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism

ment includes the broad array of cultural projects oriented toward the social recognition and de-stigmatization of mixed race subjectivity and interracial families in the U.S. Since self-identified multiracials began organizing in the late 1980s, what was once largely ignored (how the children of interracial unions identify racially), treated as taboo (interracial sex and intimacy), or thought not to exist (multiracial community) is now becoming part of the cultural mainstream. The evolution in American discourse on race and mixed race has its latest and most

Averting White Male (Ab)normality: Psychiatric Representations and Treatment of ‘Homosexuality’ in 1960s South Africa

South Africa arguably has the most progressive constitution in the world, one that includes the recognition of gay rights. However, just over four decades ago, when gay rights movements were gaining momentum worldwide, the South African government, in its homophobia, became increasingly vigilant at cracking down on any ‘homosexual’ activities within its borders. Heteropatriarchal views of sexuality in South Africa supported white male power structures, promoted binary ideas of masculinity and femininity, normalised heterosexuality, and determined social roles by biological sex. The state's control over the sexual activities of its population was more than just about controlling sexuality: it sought to prohibit interracial sex and to ensure that whites continued to propagate and retain political dominance. Ideas about homosexuality, in particular, threatened the Christian-nationalist procreative ideals of the apartheid government and increased fears about the perceived moral degeneration of society. Scholarship about homosexuality in South Africa, has shown how, in the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatrists in the South African Defence Force Military Hospital partook in human rights abuses by utilising aversion therapy, hormone therapy, sex change operations and barbiturates on young white homosexual men as a means to ‘cure’ them from their homosexual ‘disease’. Implicit in these studies of abuse is the notion that psychiatric practitioners were simply corrective agents of the apartheid state. However, most ignore the complex views of all those involved in debates about homosexuality that took place before the 1970s and outside the military. This article argues that psychiatric practitioners' attempts to quell the state's intensification of legislation on ‘homosexuality’ should be recognised. While many practitioners did support heteropatriarchal ideals of sexuality and normality, practitioners held disparate ideas about the aetiology and treatment of homosexuality that sometimes, but not always, supported the Nationalist government's objectives.

Anne Landsman's The Devil's Chimney:A magical realist narrative for a new nation?

In her novel, The Devil's Chimney (1997), Anne Landsman deploys the genre of magical realism to rewrite the exclusive narratives of colonial and apartheid South Africa and present a more inclusive national narrative. She achieves this via Connie, the unreliable narrator, who imagines the story of Beatrice, a colonial Englishwoman living on a farm in the Karoo. Beatrice disrupts familial narratives through improper private acts that breach the bounds of her society.As characteristic of the genre, her identity is rendered fluid and ambiguous as she trespasses into the domains of empire-building, interracial sex and miscegenation. Beatrice's story is dependent on Nomsa, her domestic worker, whose representation as the extreme other is subverted when she reclaims what she believes is hers and gains restitution from the text.The denouement is unhappy for both characters, arguably reflecting a truth about the present - that socially constructed difference lives on. However, Connie's engagement with the past and its truths are valuable for the future and for nation-building. In imagining a past, Connie finds out truths about her own life.These equip her with the courage needed to survive in the new nation, which Connie tentatively rewrites as one that celebrates difference and accommodates diversity.

What's Sex Got to Do with It? Race, Power, Citizenship, and "Intermediate Identities" in the Post-Emancipation United States

In the past two decades, U.S. audiences have been recipients of numerous popular accounts that seem to show the role of sexuality in destabilizing or confounding expectations of racial difference. For every highly public case, from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings to revelations about South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, there have been scores of memoirs or loosely fictionalized tales of common everyday folks whose lives were reshaped or upended by instances of interracial sexuality, mixed identity, or rediscovered interracial family heritage. (1) Even historians have gotten into the act, combing the archives for long-buried details of public or private scandals. (2) While these stories suggest that our contemporary propensity to see runs counter to the historical evidence, they also in effect repackage common knowledge from earlier periods as expose or revelation. Missing, in most of these accounts, are the ways stories of racial uncertainty actually challenge the stratified political and cultural order that characterized the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Missing, in other words, are the historical vicissitudes of citizenship and its exclusions, as shaped by interlocking histories of race and sex. This essay examines the post-emancipation United States, a moment of stark conflict between the commonly acknowledged history of interracial sex and new efforts to establish a fiction of racial difference. The stakes for the outcome of post-Civil War citizenship were high. (3) For almost 250 years of slavery, racial difference was driven and determined primarily by status, rather than visible distinction or legal definition. There were vested interests in keeping race vague in the service of reproducing the slave regime. Emancipation and the 13th Amendment overturned distinctions of condition, and the political expansiveness of the Reconstruction Amendments launched a pitched battle between advocates of full, non-racial citizenship and those who sought to recreate slavery's color line by denying citizenship rights on racial grounds. New legal definitions of race, in connection with the regulation of reproductive sexuality, were key elements, not just sideline issues, in efforts to undermine the postwar politics of non-racial citizenship. For southern white traditionalists, laws that carved out a sphere of racial distinction were the best hope of maintaining the social and political divisions that slavery could no longer enforce. Racial certainty had to be forged from a landscape of indeterminacy, and the immediate postwar emphasis on preventing miscegenation and/or interracial marriage played a pivotal role in that project. On the other side of the debate, activists and intellectuals committed to non-racial citizenship countered by asserting the long history of interracial sex, most poignantly the history of coerced sexual exploitation under the slave regime. Dramatizing the impossibility of racial purity, they resisted efforts to write into law social or civil distinctions based on race. The special difficulty they faced was to transcend racial categories on behalf of citizenship rights, while at the same time building a constituency that was willing and prepared to challenge political assaults and acts of terror that were highly racialized. Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and T. Thomas Fortune were among the best-known commentators on these topics, but they also represented a deep, broad-based, and multifaceted repository of common knowledge about interracial sex and intermediate racial identities that helped fuel political demands for non-racial citizenship. Indeed, some of the most profound contributions came from those whose names are less well-known, such as Richmond's John Mitchell, Jr., who demonstrate the extent to which the analysis that Douglass, Wells, Mitchell, and others publicized was based on knowledge with profound historical roots among the formerly enslaved, free people of color, white abolitionists, and anti-slavery radicals. …

Introduction: Discourses on Race, Sex, and African American Citizenship

From mid-19th century and even earlier, African Americans have demanded first class citizenship, the full works ... with no reservations ... and nothing less, as black labor leader A. Philip Randolph asserted in 1942. (1) But what exactly is What rights are conferred by citizenship? What obligations are exacted by citizenship? At most basic level, citizenship defines a person's relation State. When Dred Scott sought assert his rights as a citizen in 1857, Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney posed question: Can a Negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of political community formed and brought into existence by Constitution of United States, and as such become entitled all rights, and privileges, and immunities, guaranteed by that instrument citizen? Among those privileges, Taney continued, was privilege of suing in a court. In his opinion, African Americans, both free and enslaved, were not citizens. (2) The Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, recognized African Americans as citizens, and granted African Americans rights--that is, rights sue in court and participate in civil affairs on equal terms. Civil rights in 19th century were defined in federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 as right to make and enforce contracts, sue, be parties, and give evidence, inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for security of person and property. (3) These civil rights are central public realm and for economic transactions, but contract and due process rights do not protect privacy, nor do they envision social equality or personal freedom in sexual matters. Without right sexual privacy and self-determination, African Americans remained second-class citizens even as black men exercised vote, bought land, and established families. In aftermath of Reconstruction, loss of civil and political rights came after a campaign of terror that used rape and lynching as its weapons. As essays in this Special Issue of The Journal of African American History show, continuing vulnerability of African Americans accusations of sexual crimes or improprieties compromised their citizenship rights. The five historians whose essays appear in this Special Issue challenge traditional constructions of citizenship through their explorations of gender and sexuality in African American history. Destabilizing rigid categories of race that were one result of interracial sexual relations is not a new project as we are reminded in Ann S. Holder's important essay, What's Sex Got Do With It? Race, Power, Citizenship and 'Intermediate Identities,' in Post-Emancipation United States. Commentators, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, T. Thomas Fortune, and Richmond, Virginia, editor John Mitchell challenged slavery and segregation by reminding their readers that certainty had be forged from a landscape of indeterminancy. Deploying community gossip and local traditions about sexual liaisons of white politicians, Mitchell's Planet undermined their blustering rhetoric of racial purity. In a democracy, citizenship and public service could only be non-racial, Mitchell argued, because all people contributed. Holder also provides a succinct and important chronology that traces ideological and legislative evolution of prohibitions on interracial sex from colonial times 20th century. Lynn Hudson points out in Entertaining Citizenship: Masculinity and Minstrelsy in Post-Emancipation San Francisco, even asking for a glass of whiskey in a saloon on San Francisco's Barbary Coast was an assertion of black manhood and citizenship. In public spaces, arenas which have not traditionally been understood as political, in streets, at theater, and at public entertainments, African American men negotiated citizenship against derogatory images of minstrelsy. …

Marginal Southerners

Marginal Southerners Stephen Berry (bio) Jeff Forret. Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. ix + 269 pp. Tables, bibliography, and index. $45.00. In 1850, while traveling the rural rim of Spring Dale, Mississippi, a country doctor named Elijah Walker stopped in for a "fine mess of melons" at a homestead belonging to Thomas Addington. "Here I beheld what I was astonished at," Walker later noted in his diary. "All the little children were allowed a seat along with the adult company, each one (there were about seven) as dirty as the earth could make them and the smallest ones with their dressing tucked up behind, exposing the posteriors, [each] with a swarm of gnats after it." Staring into the face of Southern poverty, Walker was agog. And it wasn't just the Addingtons. On court day and election day, the "strong-lung[ed]" sovereigns poured in from the forests on their broken-backed nags, and Walker's sleepy village became a maelstrom of drunkenness and commerce, camaraderie and pugilism. Who were these people, Walker sometimes wondered. "Thus live thousands," he marveled, "and as happy as queens and Kings."1 A century and a half later, historians are still asking Walker's question: who were the poor whites of the antebellum South? Were they proud plain-folk, subsisting in an agrarian democracy (Owsley)? Were they a nomadic underclass of tenants and day-laborers crushed by the slave regime (Bolton)? Were they a tribe of warrior-herdsmen, living out a Celtic tradition as old as the Scottish hills (McWhiney)?2 In his new book, Jeff Forret is surely right that Walker's question needs to be broken down. The historiography on slaves (which reached maturity well before that of poor whites) proceeded in just such a fashion: grand interpretations—from Phillips to Elkins to Genovese—yielded to particular and telling micro-studies. The historiography took a great leap forward when we turned from how slaves related to their masters and enslavement to how they related to their spouses and children, their pets, their God, their honor, and their humanity. Forret's particular concern is how poor whites related to slaves in the Carolinas and Virginia between 1820 and 1860. In an early chapter, he surveys the [End Page 380] "points of social contact" between the two groups: poor whites worked with slaves in gold and coal mines, textile and turpentine plants, canal and railroad projects. In plantation districts, poor whites might work as overseers, patrollers, or slave catchers, or toil beside slaves as hired hands. Forret isn't especially interested in any of these points of contact, however. He is interested in race relations at the margins—away from the towns, away from the black belt, aside from work—at the rural grog shops, over midnight exchanges of stolen goods, amid a "masculine subculture of violence" and inter-racial sex. The glimpse Forret provides of the rural grog shop whets the thirst; here surely is an institution that warrants a harder look. According to one witness, the Southern countryside was "overspread" with such dens of "vice and immorality." Indeed, wherever two well-traveled roads ran together, they (like as not) met at a "reeking groggery," "dram-shop," or "rum-hole." Serving "knock-'em-stiff," "bust-head," and the "blue-ruin," these establishments occasionally catered to black and white alike; and in their inebriated states, patrons might put color aside in favor of cards or conversation. Such places were also hubs of the "underground economy," the traffic between poor whites and slaves in stolen goods. Forret is at his best in this important chapter. Having surveyed the hundred instances of "illicit trading" that appear in Carolina court records between 1845 and 1860, he concludes that slaves did most of the stealing and poor whites most of the fencing; slaves were most interested in trading for alcohol and poor whites in trading for food. However reprehensible the system that bound them, slaves were either adequately fed by their masters or eked out a subsistence by their own initiative as hunters, farmers, and poachers. When it came to trade, then...

Exclusion through Inclusion: Female Asian migration in the making of Canada as a white settler nation

In this article I explore the ways in which concerns over nation, ‘race’, gender and sexuality shaped late nineteenth and early twentieth century debates on whether Canada should exclude or include female migrants from China, Japan and India in the emerging nation-state. In the late nineteenth century, Canadians began to debate whether to allow female migration from China, Japan and India. The vast majority of those who participated in the debate argued that female migrants from Asia should be excluded, as their exclusion would insure that male migrants from Asia would be rendered as temporary residents. On the other hand, there was a small but vocal minority who argued that female migrants from Asia should be allowed into Canada. As the presence of single male Asian residents raised the specter of inter-racial sexuality, these Canadians suggested that it would be prudent to include female migrants from Asia within the nation-state. These debates raise important questions for scholars who study the relationships between nation, ‘race’, gender and sexuality. First, they point once again to the importance of gender in constituting the racialized practices of the nation. Second, as most scholars have focused on the exclusionary aspects of nationalism, they complicate our understanding of race, gender and nation by illustrating that racialized politics of nation can lead to not only exclusionary but also inclusionary practices.

Black and White and Banned All Over: Race, Censorship and Obscenity in Postwar Memphis

Memphis, Tennessee was renowned for its restrictive censorship policies in the mid-20th century. This article argues that racial considerations overrode traditional concerns regarding sex or violence in the formulation of those policies. More specifically, the article outlines three stages of race-based censorship. The first stage developed in the 1940s, as a censorial regime predicated upon suppressing threats to the racial status quo of white supremacy began cutting images of African Americans in non-servile roles. Beneath this lay a sexualized but unarticulated understanding of social equality, a favored phrase of Memphis censor Lloyd Binford. This underlying meaning rose to the forefront in the 1950s, as Memphis officials responded to Supreme Court decisions and increased Hollywood frankness with a racialized construction of obscenity, this time directed toward depictions of interracial sex or romance. Finally, as overt racism lost its political cachet, New Right mayor Henry Loeb used outcries over pornography as part of a strategy to discursively displace the racial issues facing Memphis by engineering new moral crises, helping to pave the way for Nixon’s tactic of benign neglect.

Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery

In recent years literary historians have seen a surge of interest in representations of mixed-race characters in nineteenth-century reform fiction and their relationship to issues of national identity (for example, in Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture, by Jennifer DeVere Brody [1998], and Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, by Cassandra Jackson [2004]). However, Carolyn Vellenga Berman's trenchant and meticulous study is the first to turn its attention exclusively to what the author provocatively terms “the Creole nation”—referring not just to the usual Anglo-American understanding of Creoles as inhabitants of Louisiana with French and Spanish heritage, but to the wider, more transatlantic sense of persons born and raised in European slave colonies (p. 168). Expanding her scope of analysis in that way enables Berman to make a much-needed examination of both “white” and “black” Creoles in French, British, and American literature, although she argues that such racial classifications for Creoles are anachronistic. Instead, Creole characters signify racial uncertainty, which is conjoined with a complicating double identity as “domestics,” meaning both domestic inhabitants of colonized nations and problematic household figures. To Berman, these “uncanny” characters “helped develop and re-fine nineteenth-century ideas of both racial and national belonging” (p. 22). Berman's erudite analysis traces the influence of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's 1788 bestseller, Paul et Virginie, through later works by such diverse writers as Maria Edgeworth, George Sand, and Honoré de Balzac. Saint-Pierre's tale of two mothers raising Creole daughters on the colony of île de France influences its successors by showing the inevitable imbrication of colonial slavery with ongoing efforts to reform patriarchal domesticity.

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (review)

Reviewed by: Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World ed. by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton Rachel Sarah O’Toole Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Edited by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. In this expertly edited volume, contributors employ gender analysis to argue that enslaved women and men underwent distinct emancipation experiences while gender inequities increased in postemancipation societies. Providing provocative case studies from the Caribbean, the southern U.S., and coastal Africa, the tightly crafted essays reveal how racial hierarchies, patriarchal authorities, and labor relations shaped the structures of slavery and the processes of abolition. If slavery denied enslaved women’s femininity and usurped enslaved men’s masculinity, emancipation included opportunities to express desired gendered relations. Bridget Brereton describes how freed married women and mothers withdrew from fieldwork while families enrolled children in school following emancipation in the British Caribbean. Yet, as freedpeople embraced a model of respectability with the woman at home and the man working for wages, ex-slaves did not copy elite models but rejected monogamous Christian marriage. Likewise, Ileana Rodríguez-Silva shows how freedwomen employed the Liberal rhetoric of gendered family obligations to negotiate domestic benefits including a private life denied to male workers. Yet, by bargaining themselves into the category of worker and employing ideals of domesticity, freedwomen “consequently eroded their political legitimacy as workers” (207) idealized as male. Adding to the limited choices available to freed women, Martin Klein and Richard Roberts show how a mostly female enslaved population achieved freedom in French West Africa by obtaining divorces and reuniting with their families. Indeed, gendered expectations of freedpeople and ex-slaveholders shaped economic strategies before and after emancipation. Yet, the strength of the book lies in the related arguments that the process of abolition radically reconfigured gender inequality in postemancipation societies. Sue Peabody shows how republican ex-soldiers in the French Caribbean reintegrated into society through their roles as husbands and fathers. The male warrior ideal became central to Haitian nationalism the as nineteenth century brought increased codification of separate gender spheres. Furthermore, social conservatism grew in post-slavery societies where elites and nonelites, whites and blacks, strove for a Christian heterosexual family structure that necessitated policing women’s public activities. Pamela Scully shows how emancipated men in the Cape colony (South Africa) gained citizenship and the patriarchal authority of manhood while married freedwomen lost the right to make independent contracts. Still, as Hannah Rosen indicates, discourses regarding interracial sexuality in the postemancipation battles over U.S. citizenship were part of white men’s resistance to black men’s claims to patriarchal status. Embedded in liberal ideals of freedom were imposed domestic roles for women with male head of household as Roger A. Kittleson and Carol Faulkner demonstrate how abolitionists mobilized representations of virtuous and moral femininity to present white women as the rescuers of slaves and the caretakers of former slaves. Freedom, therefore, was intertwined with new articulations of dependence. Most compellingly, the essays illustrate how race and gender were simultaneous factors. Mimi Sheller demonstrates that in Jamaica, freedmen reconstructed masculinity along with blackness to exclude freedwomen and indentured Chinese laborers from claims to citizenship. Even as Afro-Jamaican men employed Christian discourse of a patriarchal family to include themselves into British discourse of “active masculine citizenship” (82), they developed a working-class masculinity in contrast to “both parasitical white upper-class masculinity and dependent indentured masculinity” (91). Likewise, Sheena Boa shows how poor women seized street activities to subvert codes of “proper” femininity in urban St. Vincent and mock authority figures who attempt to regain public spaces by deriding poor women for inability to achieve European gender standards of propriety. Recognizing the hegemony of British moral codes, Melanie Newton argues that elite nonwhite men asserted themselves as public leaders through philanthropy that required “domestication” (226) of women’s activities in order to counteract white representations of free women as sexually transgressive. Further tangling race with gender, Marek Steedman employs a complex case of white violence against a black couple in postemancipation Louisiana to demonstrate how “southern white men perceived a threat to their own social standing in the ability of freedpeople...

Candide Shoots the Monkey Lovers

This essay analyzes a shift in racialized regimes of visual signification in French metropolitan culture during the long eighteenth century. The author explores two symbolically central figures—the dismembered black slave and the black rapist/lover who is “duly punished”—by undertaking an intertextual reading of two sets of illustrations of Voltaire's Candide (1759) designed by Moreau le Jeune. Separated by the French and Haitian Revolutions, Moreau's two sets of Candide illustrations (1787 and 1803) register an important shift in the French cultural imaginary. The figure of the maimed black male slave was put directly in circulation in French visual culture during the eighteenth century. In contrast, interracial sexuality remained “unrepresentable” in French visual culture throughout the century. By the time Haiti declared its independence (1804), this taboo was contravened by Moreau's metaphorical substitution of the figure of the monkey in 1803 to picture the black male as a bestial rapist.

THE MODERN GIRL AND RACIAL RESPECTABILITY IN 1930S SOUTH AFRICA

This essay rethinks the gender history and historiography of interwar sub-Saharan Africa by deploying the heuristic device of the ‘modern girl’ to consider how global circuits of representation and commerce informed this period of gender tumult. This device has been developed by a research group at the University of Washington to understand the global emergence during the 1920s and 1930s of female figures identified by their cosmopolitan look, their explicit eroticism and their use of specific commodities. Previous scholarship has suggested that a black modern girl imbricated in international circuits of images, ideologies and commodities only became visible in southern Africa in the post-Second World War period. Yet, analysis of the black newspaper Bantu World reveals the emergence of such a figure by the early 1930s. The modern girl heuristic helps to situate race as a key category of analysis in scholarship on women and gender in interwar Africa as contemporaries consistently debated her in racial terms. In South Africa, some social observers saw African young women’s school education, professional careers and cosmopolitan look as contributing to ‘racial uplift’. Others accused the African modern girl of ‘prostituting’ her sex and race by imitating white, coloured or Indian women, and by delaying or avoiding marriage, dressing provocatively and engaging in premarital and inter-racial sex. Cosmetics use was one of the most contentious issues surrounding the black modern girl because it drew attention to the phenotypic dimensions of racial distinctions. By analysing a beauty contest in Bantu World together with articles and letters on, and advertisements for, cosmetics, this essay demonstrates how, in white-dominated segregationist South Africa, the modern girl emerged through and posed challenges to categories of race and respectability.

‘Deviant’ innovations in Zimbabwean writing: From the racial divide to same sex desire

Since its inception in the colonial era, Zimbabwean writing has produced works which challenge officially accepted attitudes towards race, gender and/or sexuality. This article performs readings of four key post-independence texts which question established boundaries by problematizing ‘deviant’ desire. It shows how Dambudzo Marechera's Mindblast is path-breaking in its representations of interracial sex, and how the recent work of Shimmer Chinodya can be said to follow in Marechera's wake. Texts by Melissa Tandiwe Myambo and Nevanji Madanhire, on the other hand, move into the area of gender transgression, thus further destabilizing officially codified claims to ‘natural authority’.

I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement

Steve Estes's I Am a Man!, the first monograph to explore the impact of the civil rights movement on notions of manhood, is a well-conceptualized and engagingly written narrative study of the subject. Each of the book's main chapters, which can be read together or individually, explores a discrete topic pertaining to a period in the civil rights struggle, from World War II to the rise of the Black Panther party. Much of the material covered in the book will be familiar to civil rights specialists, especially the chapters on World War II, Freedom Summer, and Malcolm X. Estes's primary interest is gendered language. The book examines how both black and white men deployed “masculinist” rhetoric to assert male power, to court potential allies, and to stigmatize adversaries as an inferior class of men. A strength of the book is that Estes does not limit his analysis of “race” and the movement to African American men. Analyzing articles from the Citizens' Council's eponymous newspaper, the author shows that segregationists, worried about implementation of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, articulated their fears of a changing social order in gendered language. They warned fellow white men that moderation would usher in a day in which interracial sex between black men and white women was commonplace. Segregationist academics also entered the fray, inventing pseudoscientific theories about black men being sexual predators, while outspoken politicians red-baited civil rights advocates, denigrating them as subversives and effeminate men.

Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

Studies in American Fiction253 context for the work they do, and she has done it in an intelligent, clearly written, and entertaining fashion. Steven TracyUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst Jackson, Cassandra. Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth -Century American Literature. Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana Univ. Press. 2004. 146pp. Cloth: $49.95. Paper: $19.95. The current celebration ofcultural hybridity runs the risk offetishizing hybridity and naturalizing the imagined connections between cultural hybridity and mixed-race bodies. In order to gain a fuller understanding of this insidious fetishism of the "mix," we need to historicize the fetishism tied to interracialness even as we uncover the subversive layers of images of interracialness in nineteenth century American literature. Cassandra Jackson's Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth Century American Literature complicates the longstanding tendency to assess the progressiveness of nineteenth century images of interracialness. She refuses to simply see "almost white" characters as a courting of white audiences; she wonders about many different audiences and many different depictions of these "almost white" characters. She insists that the focus on interracialness becomes immensely productive as writers find new ways of thinking about boundaries of the nation itself. This very focus on the productive nature of this interracial "play" leads to a fresh analysis that defamiliarizes the tragic mulatto script. Why did this paradigm gain the ability to define images of the interracial in nineteenth century American literature? Jackson's study reveals that we need less critique ofthe melodrama and a greater consideration of the complex issues ofdesire and contradictions underneath this melodrama. Her exploration of the different uses of mixed-race characters gains real momentum when she argues that Chesnutt and Hopkins use mixed-race characters to think specifically about the intraracial negotiations in African American communities as opposed to the more typical investment in black and white relations. In Iola Leroy and Mandy Oxendine, she argues that interracialness becomes a productive space for the representation ofa certain type of black activism. This argument leads to questions reminiscent of Toni Morrison's inquiry in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the LiteraryImagination. As we think more about the role ofinterracialness in African American literature, Morrison's title transposes into "Playing in the Light: Interracialness and the Black Literary Imagination." Even as Jackson analyzes the work ofboth white and black authors, she provides a very helpful foundation for work addressing the ways in which mixed- 254Reviews race bodies continue to be useful stumbling blocks in African American literary traditions (both objects of fetishism and a means of interrogating the sheer hysteria ofrace). Taking Jackson's lead, we know that we cannot rush to the critique of representations of mixed-race bodies as necessarily a privileging of"lightened" blackness over darker-skinned blackness. Jackson fully confronts the critique ofthe near absence ofany tragedy or melodrama tied to dark-skinned blackness in nineteenth century American literature. She refuses, however, to make the critique the final interpretation of the significance of this interracial play. She wonders, for example, about the subversive possibilities that may have emerged when mixedrace characters were placed in conversation with each other. The larger discourse of racial categorization was shook, so she insists, by the larger conversation between these texts. A greater focus on the larger reception history of these texts and the marketing apparatus may illuminate both these acts ofsubversion and the containment ofsubversion. Jackson's readings demonstrate that the mixedrace body, at this historical moment, remained both a threat to the dominant racial order as well as the containment of subversion, a reproduction of hegemonic whiteness. Her final move to a comparison of the racial categories in an 1850, 1890, 1920, 1930, and 2000 census is a poignant meditation on the constant production and reproduction of race. Even as she thinks about the historical continuity ofthis racial classification, she warns against the conflation of nineteenth century, 1920s and 1930s, and contemporary images ofmixed-race bodies. This conflation often occurs when we allow the "tragic mulatto" paradigm to remain the troublesome starting point as opposed to the much more nuanced argument in Barriers Between Us. The complex shifts in these census reports are Jackson's grand ending point. As Ralph Ellison wrote...

Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South

MY FATHER'S NAME WUZ ROBERT STEWART. HE WUZ A WHITE MAN. My mother wuz named Ann. She wuz part Indian. Her father wuz a Choctaw Indian and her mother a black woman--a slave. (1) This is how Charley Stewart, a former slave, described his lineage. Stewart was not alone in claiming parents and grandparents of mixed racial heritage; there are many references to mixed-race ancestry in the interviews of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. The interviews also contain candid observations about interracial unions in general and about how people of African descent understood relationships that crossed social, legal, and racial boundaries. The former slaves described various combinations of racial unions and their ramifications for the participants, families, fellow slaves, and offspring. This article will consider the words of ex-slaves, using the WPA collection and a selection of biographies and autobiographies of slaves, and will re-create descriptions of and attitudes toward interracial sex during the nineteenth century. (2) These accounts indicate that their views on interracial sex varied according to the race of the participants because power with regard to sexual consent also varied according to race. The reminiscences of former slaves reveal that they had been aware of the interracial relationships around them and their heritage as the progeny of these relationships. (3) Though both types of relationships--between black slaves and whites and between black slaves and American Indians--traversed racial boundaries, the ex-slaves interpreted the power dynamics within these unions differently. In the eyes of many ex-slaves, relationships between whites and blacks were usually matters of forced sex between the powerful and the powerless: [I]mmoral white men have, by force, injected their blood into our veins.... (4) From the perspective of former slaves, relationships between blacks and American Indians, in contrast, were apparently more equal because both groups were stigmatized by the dominant white culture. Thus, the ex-slaves understood sexual relationships between blacks and whites as coercive and unions between blacks and American Indians as consensual. Some of these accounts also discuss the thoughts and feelings of the offspring of interracial unions and the slave community's response to mixed-race progeny. The narratives illustrate that within the slave community interracial sex provoked a range of emotions from anger and fear of racial degradation to acceptance and pride, depending on how slaves perceived the context of such unions. This examination of interracial sex in the nineteenth-century South deliberately focuses on the slaves' voices. Other historians of this region and era usually touch on the topic only briefly and rely heavily on sources produced by whites, such as travel diaries, personal papers, plantation records, and legal documents. (5) Consequently, the behaviors, thoughts, and words of black participants are mediated through white informants. Or the black perspective in such relationships is lost altogether; black people become silent figures instead of actors in their own right. Furthermore, scholars have questioned the accuracy of the WPA slave narratives and of biographies of and autobiographies by slaves. Despite questions of emphasis and accuracy, however, these sources provide direct links to the inner lives of slaves. (6) Many of the ex-slaves spoke quite passionately about the pain of racial amalgamation in the antebellum South. (7) In autobiographies and biographies, former slaves recounted their own histories as the progeny of interracial liaisons and gave their opinions of such relationships. Moreover, former slaves did not talk about interracial sex only in terms of black and white participants; they also mentioned American Indian relatives and ancestors--in other words, progeny of and participants in another category of interracial sex. …

Deviant and dangerous: Pro-slavery representations of Jamaican slave women's sexuality, c. 1780–1834

This article analyses the pro-slavery debate about Jamaican slave women's sexuality in the period 1770–1834. The first part shows that two images of slave women dominated this debate and argues that these served primarily to displace fears about the viability of the plantation system. The second part explores the link between the two images and the practice of interracial sex, amongst others, by comparing Jamaican attitudes towards interracial sex with on the North American mainland. The conclusion links the analysis to the existing scholarship on pro-slavery discourse and describes some long-term effects of the two images of slave women's sexuality.

Barriers between us: interracial sex in nineteenth-century American literature

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Race and Nation in Nineteenth-Century Interracial Fictions 1. The Last of the Mohicans or the First of the Mulattos? Slavery and Native American Removal in Cooper's American Frontier 2. A Land without Names: National Anxiety in The Slave or, The Memoirs of Archy Moore 3. Reconstructing America in Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic and Frances E. W. Harper's Minnie's Sacrifice 4. Doubles in Eden in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes 5. I will gladly share with them my richer heritage: Schoolteachers in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt's Mandy Oxendine Epilogue: Formulating a National Self Notes Bibliography Index

Twilight Moments

In 1863 the Codrington divorce trial exposed to the light of day what had long been concealed in darkness. Although married to an admiral, for years Helen Codrington had spent her nights in bed with the mannish feminist Emily Faithfull without exciting suspicion. In fact, when their marriage broke down, the admiral charged Helen with having affairs with male officers. Defending her honor, Helen countercharged that one night, as she slept with Emily, the admiral silently entered her bedroom and slipped into the bed—by implication, to molest Emily. At the time, it appeared, this incident was one of those private quarrels that mark unhappy marriages. But in the legal proceedings Emily initially verified Helen's accusation. To ward off this damaging information the admiral acquired a "sealed packet" of incriminating information about Emily, who, in response, withdrew her testimony. What was in the packet? Nobody knew for sure, but rumors spread that this "romantic and credulous" woman had formed an attachment to a "dangerous friend"; Emily was said to be "of impure mind," and the poet Robert Browning gossiped that she lied to "interest" another female poet, a new twist to the "sportings of the fancy." As Martha Vicinus recounts, no one openly expressed the suspicion that the two women had a sexual relationship, but vague rumors and gossip served to police their behavior all too effectively. As a result of the trial both Helen and Emily [End Page 139] had to withdraw from society—Helen permanently and Emily temporarily. Admiral Codrington, however, remarried soon after the divorce.1 This incident does not fit comfortably into the dominant model of the history of sexuality, which has been inspired by Foucault's delineations of sexual identities in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. Had the case occurred in the late 1920s, according to the model, Faithfull would have been stigmatized as a perverted lesbian spinster, a danger to young women.2 By then discourses incorporating the concept of sexual identities were widely employed to define and discipline those with unconventional desires. In the 1860s, however, the public was presumably aware only of deviant sexual acts, not of sexual identities. However, the absence of both the stigmatized identity "lesbian" and any evidence that she had committed deviant sexual acts did not permit Emily Faithfull to elude harmful rumors and gossip. We need additional conceptual tools to discuss cases like Emily Faithfull's, which involved sexual desires, relationships, and practices that did not produce identities, that were half-understood, expressed only by oblique gestures, veiled in silence. Looking at the period before modern sexual identities, historians sometimes claim that societies "uneasily tolerated" unconventional sexual behavior such as interracial sex or sex between women, but it is all too easy for readers to confuse toleration and acceptance.3 Hidden desires could still be subject to discipline. This article uses the metaphor of "twilight" to explore these issues, drawing upon histories of interracial sex, prostitution, sex between men and between women, and unmarried motherhood. I propose "twilight" as a metaphor for those sexual practices and desires that societies prohibit by law or custom but that people pursue anyhow, whether in secret or as an open secret. Twilight can be a metaphor for those silent moments when a married man picked up a boy on the street, when a wife caressed her female friend, or, more sinisterly, when the master crept into the slave quarters to rape a woman. These people's desires did not create a fixed identity; they indulged in these forbidden moments and then returned to their ordinary lives, just as twilight fades into darkest night, and night is succeeded by the dawn. Just as one can see only vague shapes in the dim light of dusk, twilight words conveyed sexual desires and practices that were only half-understood—like the abortion information whispered in the aisles of the pharmacy or the pornography hidden in a respectable man's library. The metaphor of twilight...

Sex, Race, and Ambiguity in the Old South

In this excellent study, Joshua Rothman explores how sex across the color line affected the social construction of race in early national and antebellum Virginia. Rothman complicates our understanding of racial identity, consent, coercion, family, and even the role of law in late-eighteenthand earlynineteenth-century Virginia. Rothman demonstrates how interracial sex blurred the lines between black and white and between coercion and consent. Sex