Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire

“Mostly with White Girls”: Settlement, Spatiality, and Emergent Interracial Sexualities in a Canadian Prairie City

“…In highlighting our interlocutors’ situatedness in these spaces and discourses, we aim to show youth as key social actors in the transformations of sexuality occurring through globalization and transnational processes. As Ray has cogently suggested, “interracial sexualities are constituted through multiple histories,” therefore, “to take up only one of those histories is to tell only part of the story” (, 191). In telling one partial story of interracial sexuality, we acknowledge that our ethnography produces “race”—by locating it—even at the same time as it aims to dislocate race, and we also recognize the ethnographic and analytical work remaining to further challenge “the ontological security and stability of ‘race’” (Nayak , 416).…”

“…Immigration, globalization, and urbanization in Canada have led to rising numbers of people involved in interracial unions, whereby a celebratory stance of public “tolerance” exists simultaneously with ongoing regulation of interracial sexuality (Kitossa and Deliovsky , 514). The history of white settler colonialism, the dominance and deepening of white supremacy, and the paradoxes of multiculturalism are shown to be the current conditions for the negative attitudes in particular toward Black men and white women, due to a “longer history of defamation in the Eurocentric cultural imaginary” (Kitossa and Deliovsky , 517; Ray ; Fanon [] 2008). These are the complex contexts wherein male African immigrant and refugee youth forge sexual lives and subjectivities.…”

“Internal Frontiers”: Whiteness, Intimacy, and the Expatriate Home in Britain's African Colonies during the Postwar Period

“…83 "Just as white men's unfettered sexual access to colonized/enslaved women embodied the raced and gendered power dynamics of empire, so too did the restricted sexual access of colonized/enslaved men and white women to one another." 84 "Black peril"-the sexual threat black men were thought to pose to white women-has been well litigated elsewhere, with many arguing that fears around "black peril" emerged particularly during times of racial anxiety. 85 What interests me most here is not the conditions that created these fears but the way in which they constructed the secretary's body as one in need of protection from this supposed threat.…”

“…Despite the apparent differences between these two disparate figures, exploring their histories in tandem exposes the technologies of sex that constructed the former as representative of the "sexual-cum-racial purity" of the British colonial class and the latter as an embodiment of the sexual deviance that the colonies came to represent. 73 The archive offers us only a fragmentary glimpse of the unnamed woman in an interview with a Scottish surveyor recruited by the British colonial office to work first in Gambia and then in Tanganyika in the early 1950s. 74 Whilst stationed near an unnamed remote village in Tanganyika, the surveyor asked his unnamed houseboy to procure an unnamed woman for sex.…”

A Certain Class of Undesirables

“…These codes were gendered because they problematised the sexual desires of White women to control and exercise authority over them, while they exoticised colonised and enslaved women in order to enable uncontrolled access to them (Chadhuri & Strobel, 1992;Kempadoo, 2000;Smart, 1992). 1 By deploying these narratives, authorities in the colonies and slave societies intervened in the intimate lives of enslaved and colonised people (Bayly & Bayly, 1987;Cleall, 2012;Ray, 2013). At the same time, it enabled the White male ruling class in the colonies and slave societies to enact their own emotional and sexual fantasies, using the bodies of colonised and enslaved people, while they controlled the sexual opportunities of White women (Ghosh, 2005;Livesay, 2016;McClintock, 1995;Ono-George, 2010).…”