Theater-goers have seen
interracial sex in theater and on stage for several decades, and they are ready to see interracial families that triumph and redeem.
Yet, that troubling memory of the black man who was "alone triumphant" generated a surprising variety of responses, including William Faulkner's meditations on the linkage between interracial fighting and
interracial sex. Of course, Faulkner was not alone among writers of serious fiction in responding to this cultural event, and, if successful, this essay will suggest further and deeper investigations of Johnson's influence on other writers and artists.
interracial sex or marriage, Alexie redefines Native American
Interracial sex was imagined as not only dangerous but also tempting.
The "mulatto" population of Virginia, which might be taken as an indicator of the extent of
interracial sex, probably grew throughout the early national and antebellum periods.
Harris, "From Abolitionist Amalgamators to 'Rioters of Five Points': The Discourse of
Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City," in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed.
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.
By the 1920s, Harlem had become the center not just of the
interracial sex trade, but of the white sex trade as well.
If the minute the censorship laws ban scenes of
interracial sex (as the Censorship Board did in South Africa), the writer responds by writing scenes of
interracial sex, the state is still, in a significant sense, dictating what the writer is doing.
Harris, "From Abolitionist Amalgamators to "Rulers of the Five Points": The Discourse of
Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City," in Hodes ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (1999): 191-212.
Notable among his findings are revelations of
interracial sex in the families of George Washington and Martha Custis Washington, including the possibility that Washington was the father of a slave son.
The dialogue over these practices--birth control, free unions, nonmonogamy,
interracial sex and marriage, and lesbianism--reveals differences of perspective, strength of voice, and costs for speaking out, differences that expose the structured tensions between women and me n and blacks and whites.
