ABSTRACT
A substantial body of literature exists that has produced ideas about Caribbean sexual relations, identities, and behaviors, while avoiding an explicit focus on sexuality. Studies of the “New World Negro” in the English-speaking Caribbean during the first half of the twentieth century amply illustrate this tendency. Viewed against European and Euro-American systems and cultures, the departure of black sexual and familial relations from the dominant notion of “family”—maleheaded, patrilineal, heterosexual, monogamous, and co-residentialsparked intense debate and concern among social scientists. Various arguments were formulated, and varying explanations and theories sought, that would account for the particular conditions and practices of black, postemancipation New World arrangements, where marriage was not a norm among the working class and partnerships and sexual relationships followed a number of other patterns.1 Many such studies dealt with, if not centered upon, expressions of black sexual relations, commonly defined as “mating.” Concerns about “immoral” and “loose” sexual practices, “promiscuity,” “unstable” or “irregular” conjugal relations, and “illegitimacy” of children often propelled early-twentieth-century studies into “the Negro” condition. Notions of black pathology, demoralization, disorganization, and deviancy pervaded the discourse. In particular, ideas of the American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who advanced that slavery had broken down black family life and had created unregulated, deviant behavior that
included criminal activity and promiscuity, served to inform and frame research and interventions that dominated academic understandings of sexual relations in the Caribbean for several decades.2
