ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with exploring the dialectic between personal intimacy and the global flows and interconnections that both featured in the colonial past and pervade the increasingly mobile present. It discusses the forbidden frontiers where ethnic and racial lines are crossed and the efforts made to redress or prevent this. Sexual representations of the ethnic and racial Other are a common feature of ethnic frontiers, which provide rich and fertile ground for the sexual fantasies that seem easily to take root in the gaps that national and ethnic differences open up. Ann Stoler and Margaret Wiener show that for colonial authorities throughout Asia the ethnic and racial frontier remained a dangerous twilight world where intimacy between white and native was a potentially fatal attraction that demanded continuous boundary work to remedy or constrain. Among the most violent and shocking punishments for violating ethnosexual boundaries were the lynchings and castrations inflicted for transgressing the colour line in the American South.
