Colonial erotic literature fantasized slave lasciviousness for four centuries

Evidence

Another convention provided the occasion for a specifie category of writing. The supposedly receptive lascÏviousness of the slaves, mulatto women and men who were of mixed blood, and the animal savagery with which the Africans were credited, produced an abundant supply for the erotic literature fIourishing in the islands fI’OIll the seventeenth to the end of the nineteenth century. In this manner, from one blind spot to the next, a literature of illusion came into being, one moreover that, every now and then, was not lacking charm or an old-fashioned grace. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 402

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels reader’s ‘immodesty moral panics’ material — eroticized projections of colonized bodies as a complement to sumptuary and dress-panic literature on the colonizer side. — connects to: Colonial rivalries were narrated through gendered and sexualized metaphors — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 525; Colonial desire inverts cause and effect, making whiteness the true object of love; Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial rivalries were narrated through gendered and sexualized metaphors #corroborates (0.85) — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 525
• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess #corroborates (0.85)
• Ascribed emotions policed colonial racial hierarchies by defining what is out of place #corroborates (0.82) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 593
• Colonial desire inverts cause and effect, making whiteness the true object of love #corroborates (0.80)
• Enslaved people also absorbed the view of women as temptresses #expands (0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 112
• Colonial psychology framed colonized peoples as incapable of desiring freedom #corroborates (0.78) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 156
• Colonial officials displaced anxiety about empire onto bodily and comic self-descriptions #corroborates (0.78)
• Medieval genitalia fantasies persisted into colonial-era European mythology #corroborates (0.70)