Sex in(between) Black (Male) and White (Female)

The interest and paranoia created by interracial contact in New World colonial societies can be accurately assessed if one considers that in the French colony of Saint Domingue a taxonomy of race was designed which established 128 categories of black and white racial miscegenation. Containing equal proportions of the two races were the mulattoes, the offspring of pure white men and pure black women. A little further down were the sang-meles. They had 127 parts of white blood and one part of black blood; this was the original sin which made them persons of colour, that is, racially inferior people. The entire interracial genealogy stemmed from one single phenomenon: the attraction which women of colour held over white men. Therein lies the norm of colonial libido. Our presentation will deal with the erotic, psychic and political "anomalies" that derived from the rupture of that norm, that is, it will include a study of the consequences of sex between a white woman and a black man. In this we will be assisted by C.L.R. James, William Faulkner, Frantz Fanon, Dany Laferriere and Andrea Levy who will help to show the significance of that abnormality in terms of the imaginary.