Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History.

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes. (New York and London: New York University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xvi, 542. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8147-3557-6; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 0-8147-3556-8.)

In editing this collection, Martha Hodes has performed an invaluable service to those of us in the profession who endeavor to teach what has been the focus of our own scholarship: race and sex. Hodes has marshaled twenty-four engaging essays that--despite traversing time, region, and ethnicity--serve to make two important arguments. First, the volume convincingly demonstrates the futility of latching onto racial categories. These essays collectively defy, subvert, co-opt, and contest placement of historical subjects into neat boxes of racial and ethnic identity. Second, while custom and law may have snookered many historians enamored with racial classifications into believing that distinct racial boundaries effectively cordoned off groups from one another, the authors here repeatedly illustrate the permeability of racial boundaries.

Many of the selections in this collection have appeared in print elsewhere. This is not meant as a criticism: on the contrary, this volume contains some of the most important essays written to date about race and sex, and it will make that scholarship far more accessible to a larger audience. Hodes opens the book, logically, with Gary Nash's 1995 Organization of American Historians presidential address, "The Hidden History of Mestizo America." This surveys racial and ethnic mixing in North America from the 1690s to the 1970s, and it is wonderfully expansive in scope. Nash castigates what he calls "America's Achilles' heel of race" and throws down the gauntlet by insisting that historians need to recognize and to laud the salient trend of hybridity in America's past. Much of the work in this collection that follows heeds Nash's call for a reconceptualization of race studies that is infused with a "pan-ethnic, pan-racial, antiracist sensibility" (p. 27).

Several of the contributions explore intimate interracial relations between Indians and non-indigenous groups, and a few focus on sexuality and ethnicity in the West, but, understandably, many of the essays focus on black-white relations in the American South. This group includes Thomas E. Buckley's "Unfixing Race: Class, Power, and Identity in an Interracial Family," one of the most important and persuasive: articles ever written on antebellum racial identity. Buckley examines the life of Robert Wright, a free African American in Virginia. Wright--who is the son of a well-to-do "gentleman farmer" and his African slave--twice marries white women. Buckley's narrative reveals an openness about interracial sexual relationships that contrasts sharply with much traditional scholarship that has emphasized the rigidity and impermeability of racial boundaries. Class, not race, shaped Robert Wright's identity.

Tolerance of interracial relationships is likewise woven into the essay co-authored by Josephine Boyd Bradley and Kent Anderson Leslie. They tell the story of Amanda America Dickson, a Georgia slave begot by the rape of her slave mother by her master father. Dickson, although legally a slave through her childhood, was raised in the white household and was as doted on and spoiled by her father and grandmother as any white child would have been. She was educated, married a white man, and inherited her father's fortune in 1887, thereby becoming the largest property owner in Hancock County, Georgia. Acceptance of interracial pairings, however, gave way after the Civil War, and the essays reflect a hardening along racial lines that was not pervasive in the antebellum period. This is best seen in changes in law over time. Peter Bardaglio's contribution is a useful reference guide that surveys laws governing interracial sex and marriage, although it claims no new theoretical or analytical ground. Peggy Pascoe's award-winning article, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of `Race' in Twentieth-Century America," imaginatively analyzes miscegenation law in the twentieth century and the coeval development of race ideology. She argues that the eradication of racism--the construction of social hierarchies on the basis of physical characteristics--hinged on the deliberate nonrecognition of race. Pascoe traces this development through four important miscegenation cases.

Sexual violence across racial lines constitutes another important theme throughout the volume. Sharon Block sees much common ground shared by female slaves and white servants in early America. They engaged in "parallel struggles" (p. 141) with masters and mistresses, because both contended with unwelcomed sexual overtures. Hannah Rosen and Laura Edwards take up the subject of sexual violence during the tumultuous Reconstruction era. Rosen examines how the rapes of freedwomen in Memphis in 1866 by white southerners served to reestablish the rapists' racial superiority as well as privileges of manhood that had been shaken by war and emancipation. African American women, however, by testifying publicly about their assaults, laid claim to their newly won rights to freedom of work and movement in and about the public spaces of Memphis. Edwards focuses on the alleged rape of a white North Carolina woman by a slave near war's end, and on the subsequent struggle over the event' s meaning in a South being reconstituted by a new set of power relationships. Finally, Leslie Dunlap takes us a long way toward understanding the increasing preoccupation of a white South with interracial sexual assault. Dunlap, in an interesting shift, focuses on sexually predatory white men and their wives who challenged sexual prerogatives claimed by their husbands, many of whom flagrantly had sexual relations with African American women. These essays, like others in the volume, decidedly and emphatically place gender and sexuality squarely at the center--not at the margins--of post-Civil War contests of race.

I adopted this work as a text in an undergraduate course on race and sex in American history, and students generally found the selections accessible and readable. Despite some unusual production problems--several students found pages missing or out of place--the book facilitated my pedagogical goals of challenging boundaries between the so-called public and private worlds. The essays also provoked students into thinking about sex and sexuality as having connections to the more "traditional" forms of history.

DIANE MILLER SOMMERVILLE

Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison Campus