The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism

by Chelsea Schields (Editor), Dagmar Herzog (Editor)

Overview

Unique in its global and interdisciplinary scope, this collection will bring together comparative insights across European, Ottoman, Japanese, and US imperial contexts while spanning colonized spaces in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural, intellectual and political history, anthropology, law, gender and sexuality studies, and literary criticism, The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism combines regional and historiographic overviews with detailed case studies, making it the key reference for up-to-date scholarship on the intimate dimensions of colonial rule. Comprising more than 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five parts:

• Directions in the study of sexuality and colonialism
• Constructing race, controlling reproduction
• Sexuality in law
• Subjects, souls, and selfhood
• Pleasure and violence.

The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism is essential reading for students and researchers in gender, sexuality, race, global studies, world history, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138581395
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	05/25/2021
Series:	Routledge Companions to Gender
Pages:	386
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Chelsea Schields is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Her scholarship explores the histories of sexuality, race, and the politics of oil and empire in modern Europe and the Caribbean. Her current book project examines how the age of oil and the end of empire brought renewed intervention in Caribbean intimate life. Recent articles have appeared in Radical History Review (2020), Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (2019), and Gender & History (2019).

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005), Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011), Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (2017), and Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (2018). She is currently researching the theology and history of disability in Germany, 1900–2020.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Sex, Intimacy, and Power in Colonial Studies – Chelsea Schields and Dagmar Herzog; ; Part I: Directions in the Study of Sexuality and Colonialism; Old Empires, New Perspectives: Sexuality in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas – Nicole von Germeten ; Sexual Hierarchies and Erotic Autonomy: Colonizing and Decolonizing Sex in the Caribbean – Nicole Bourbonnais ; Sexuality in Colonial Africa: Current Trends and New Directions – Corrie Decker ; On Endless Empires: Sexuality and Colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa –Susanna Ferguson and Seçil Yılmaz ; Sexuality and the Japanese Empire: A Contested History – Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci ; Transactions: Sex, Power, and Resistance in Colonial South and Southeast Asia – Kate Imy ; Settler Sexualities: Reproducing Nations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – Gregory D. Smithers; ; Part II: Constructing Race, Controlling Reproduction ; Sexual Intermixture, Blood Lineage, and Legal Disabilities in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica and the British Atlantic – Brooke N. Newman ; Conceiving Colonialism: Contraceptive Practices in Colonial and Post-Colonial Mexico – Nora E. Jaffary ; Demographic Anxieties, Pro-natalism and Governing Difference in the Late Ottoman Empire – Gülhan Balsoy; Settler Colonialism and the Canadian Child Welfare System – Laura C.L. Landertinger ; Imperial Wetnursing in Italian East Africa – Diana Garvin ; Race, Gender, Colonialism, Racial Capitalism, and Black Women’s Wombs – Françoise Vergès ; ; Part III: Sexuality in Law ; Negotiating Adultery in Colonial Quito – Chad Thomas Black ; Regulated Prostitution in French-Colonized Northern Vietnam and its Failures, 1920-1945 – Christina Firpo ; The League of Nations and Colonial Prostitution – Liat Kozma ; "In Consonance with their Sacred Laws": The Colonial Remaking of Religious Courts in Iraq – Sara Pursley ; "The Right to my Daughter": African Women, French Men, and Custody of Métis Children in Twentieth-Century French Colonial Africa – Rachel Jean-Baptiste ; Pining for Purity: Miscegenation, "Petty" Apartheid, and the South African Immorality (Amendment) Act (1950) – Susanne M. Klausen ; ; Part IV: Subjects, Souls, and Selfhood ; Single Women and Spiritual Capital: Sexuality and Devotion in Colonial Guatemala – Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara ; Mixed Marriage and the Embodiment of Law in French Algeria – Judith Surkis ; White French Women, Colonial Migration, and Sexual Labor between Metropole and Colony – Caroline Séquin ; Transgender History in Sinophone Taiwan – Howard Chiang ; Queer Sovereignties: Reimagining Sexual Citizenship from the Dutch Caribbean – Wigbertson Julian Isenia ; Colonialist Intimacies: Loving and Leaving on Lesbian Land – Katherine Schweighofer ; ; Part V: Pleasure and Violence ; A Spanish Notary in a Nahua Town in Post-Contact Mexico: A Case of Sexual and Cultural Liminality – Martin Nesvig ; A Trace of Law: State Building and Criminalization of Buggery in Jamaica – Tracy Robinson ; Gender, Sexual Violence, and the Herero Genocide – Elisa von Joeden-Forgey ; Violence, Anxieties, and the Making of Interracial Dangers: Colonial Surveillance and Interracial Sexuality in the Belgian Congo – Amandine Lauro ; Longing, Love, and Loss in Times of War: South Asian Sepoys on the Western Front – Santanu Das ; Sexual Restraint, Substitution, Transgression, and Extreme Violence across the Late-Colonial Dutch East Indies and Postcolonial Indonesia – Esther Captain ; ;

Editorial Reviews

"The essays in this wide-reaching collection remind us of how, why, and under what conditions empires were built upon—and helped to secure—the 'race-sex nexus.' From sexual citizenship to interracial wet-nursing, from queer sovereignties to settler sexualities and erotic economies, we have not just new histories but new vocabularies for thinking through the geopolitics of sexuality and colonialism past and present."

- Antoinette Burton, Maybelle Leland Swanlund Endowed Chair and Professor of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"This volume is indispensable reading. By unlocking the imperial logics regulating reproduction and criminalizing sex across the globe, these riveting essays also offer urgent insight into defiant and decolonizing practices of intimacy, eroticism, care, and kinship that embolden survival and spur the imagination of possible worlds."

- Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California

"This ambitious and timely collection is set to become the essential introduction to the role of sexuality in the pursuit of imperialism. It includes an impressive range of contributions from eminent scholars around the globe and combines familiar sources with less frequently mined material to demonstrate the centrality of sex to imperial projects, from the sixteenth-century dominance of the Spanish Empire, the nineteenth-century rise of Ottoman influence, twentieth-century Japanese control of East and Southeast Asia, to contemporary settler societies. The contributions draw upon innovative methodologies to reshape the reading of colonial archives and draw out the experiences of the colonized, including forms of resistance, survival, and eroticism. Overall, the expansive view of the volume brings substantial rewards: it decenters Europe’s colonial experiences, enables unique global comparison, and brings historical forms of colonialism into dialogue with the continued presence of colonial frameworks in contemporary constructions of sexuality and desire."

- Kate Fisher, Professor of History, University of Exeter

From the Publisher