Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America, edited by Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer L. Morgan, a superb collection of essays, models an intelligent and effective approach to teaching historically about sensitive topics, like race and sex, through its meticulous attention to language and its commitment to close reading. Language matters here, more so than in most histories of sexuality and race. The sources aren't merely the means to the story; they are the story. Because people in the past were seldom as candid and transparent as we might wish regarding sexual matters, historians must take care in parsing the precise meaning of words, their spellings, and their contexts. Take the title itself: connexions. I learned in the introduction that this spelling of “connections” has a sexual connotation, with the “x” indicating that illicit sex was involved. An adulterous affair, for example, might be referred to as a “connexion.” Knowing this obviously changes the way we read the historical record.
It's not just that words shift in meaning over time; so does usage. In each essay, we are rewarded with the authors’ close attention to the embedded connotations of language. For example, in diaries or legal records reporting white (male) slaveholders “having to do” with “Negros,” we might assume that white men were having sex with black women. But recognizing that the word “Negro” conventionally meant “Negro man” demands a rereading of archival evidence, challenging heterosexual assumptions that have elided same-sex liaisons in the historical record. The authors in this collection repeatedly and revealingly correct such misperceptions and oversights.
Just as historians have generally assumed heterosexuality, our modern understandings about bodies more broadly influenced our understanding of historical documents. Sharon Block's insightful reexamination of runaway-slave narratives explores in exemplary fashion the diverse ways that fugitive women and men were described bodily in print. Some advertisements focussed on slaves’ scars, some on their complexion, some on their “cunning”; and each descriptor carried precise meaning related to ethnicity, gender, and race. The fact that Block could not find a single mention of beauty in relation to African Americans in the mid-eighteenth-century almanacs she examined says it all: the presence, absence, and inflections of words spoke volumes about the worldview and the world itself of American slavery.
The volume's focus on the archives makes it especially useful for historical-methods courses, both undergraduate and graduate. And the essays work well together; Stephanie Camp's examination of racial beauty follows seamlessly from Block's; Julian Carter's provocative essay about the way that archival material has been categorized and prioritized, separating “history” from “mythography,” which tends to prioritize heterosexuality and diminish gay history, sets the foundation for a deeper understanding of Marc Stein's interesting work on what he terms “heterosexual supremacy.” Considering the 1960s Supreme Court privacy cases involving birth control and pornography, Stein illustrates how ideas about race and class comingled with ideas about sex and reproduction, ultimately prioritizing heterosexuality, marriage, and procreation.
Sometimes the archive “conceals, distorts, and silences as much as it reveals” (144), as Marisa Fuentes's engaging essay about Rachael Pringle Polgreen proposes. Polgreen was a former slave who became a slave-owner, the alleged proprietor of a well-known brothel in eighteenth-century Barbados, and ultimately a character in a novel whose fiction would largely obscure her real life story.
Among the many strengths of this collection is its expansive chronology, suggesting the persistent challenges of reading the archival record of recent as well as distant eras on their own terms. In her study of mid-twentieth-century black popular print culture, Leisa D. Meyer writes, “One of the most vexing questions in studying the history of sexuality is how to research sexual subjectivity” (257). In one way or another, these essays reflect upon that central question. Though space doesn't permit me to extol the virtues of each essay included in Connexions, they all speak to the ways in which the archives are not simply preserved records of the past; they represent pieces of much larger and more complicated stories, never fully stable or accessible to us, but always intriguing and potentially revealing.
