ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

Sex, intimacy, and power in colonial studies

part I|87 pages

Directions in the study of sexuality and colonialism

chapter 1|9 pages

Old empires, new perspectives

Sexuality in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas

chapter 2|12 pages

Sexual hierarchies and erotic autonomy

Colonizing and decolonizing sex in the Caribbean

chapter 3|13 pages

Sexuality in colonial Africa

Current trends and new directions

chapter 4|10 pages

On endless empires

Sexuality and colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa

chapter 5|13 pages

Sexuality and the Japanese empire

A contested history

chapter 6|16 pages

Transactions

Sex, power, and resistance in colonial South and Southeast Asia

chapter 7|12 pages

Settler sexualities

Reproducing nations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

part II|62 pages

Constructing race, controlling reproduction

part III|61 pages

Sexuality in law

chapter 17|11 pages

“In consonance with their sacred laws”

The colonial remaking of religious courts in Iraq

chapter 18|9 pages

“The right to my daughter”

African women, French men, and custody of métis children in twentieth-century French colonial Africa

chapter 19|11 pages

Pining for purity

Interracial sex, the South African Immorality (Amendment) Act (1950), and “petty” apartheid

part IV|61 pages

Subjects, souls, and selfhood

chapter 20|10 pages

Single women and spiritual capital

Sexuality and devotion in colonial Guatemala

chapter 24|9 pages

Queer sovereignties

Re-imagining sexual citizenship from the Dutch Caribbean

chapter 25|9 pages

Colonialist intimacies

Loving and leaving on lesbian land

part V|71 pages

Pleasure and violence

chapter 26|10 pages

A Spanish notary in a Nahua town in post-contact Mexico

A case of sexual and cultural liminality

chapter 27|11 pages

A trace of law

State building and the criminalization of buggery in Jamaica

chapter 29|12 pages

Violence, anxieties, and the making of interracial dangers

Colonial surveillance and interracial sexuality in the Belgian Congo

chapter 30|14 pages

Longing, love, and loss in times of war

South Asian sepoys on the Western Front