Abstract

In this dissertation, I take an extra-interdisciplinary approach to examine how the social formation of "racialized subjects" historically entails the formation of "racialized sexualities" in the service of Western imperialism. Despite the currency of the rhetoric of "race, gender, class, and sexuality" in the contemporary humanities, this process is routinely obscured by the formulation of these four categories as discrete empirical phenomena that, in essence, academics can unite and separate at will. So "race" is supposed to signify "dark" folk, theoretically, while "sex" is the preserve of white "others." I contend, against such schools of thought, that these analytic concepts are themselves contingent social artifacts and, further, that the conventional opposition between "race" and "sex" is a false opposition which conceals certain fundamental structures of power. The immediate context of my inquiry is the territory seized as the "United States of America." However, unlike the white nation-bound analyses criticized by Pan-African and African Diasporic figures for centuries, I probe several periods in the history of North America without effacing the larger context of European "expansion" through "chattel slavery" and colonialisms of all kinds. ;In chapter one, I maintain the recent "historicization" of sexuality is committed to an "Aryanist" idealization of "Ancient Greece," such that "human sexuality," whether "heterosexual" or "homosexual" in character, is defined as an exclusive achievement of the "white civilization" of Western history. My second chapter continues this investigation with regard to "sex," or gender, and shows how the "social construction" of sexual identity is embedded in the racial conflicts of imperialism. In chapters three and four, I stress the significance of class division to the racialized history of sex and sexuality by exposing the construction of "colonized bourgeoisies" based, in large part, on social differentiation through sexual behavior. My fifth chapter unpacks the fiction of one fashionable Black writer whose corpus is especially emblematic of the production of erotic identification for colonial and neo-colonial purposes. In conclusion, the sixth and final chapter studies the commercialization of gender and sexuality discourse in the age of neo-colonialism en route to promoting revolutionary rather than counter-revolutionary articulations of the subject