Regulating Interracialized Intimacies Perspectives from Europe and Beyond

Introduction: Beyond Marriage Prohibitions: New Directions in the Study of Regulating Relationships Across and Beyond the Colour Line

BETTY DE HART AND ELENA ZAMBELLI

PART I Prohibition

1 Of Coercion, Consent, and Concubines: The Regulation and Litigation of Interracial Sex and Marriage under Slavery in the U.S. South

ARIELA GROSS

2 Regulating Sexual Mixing in the Italian Colonies of the Horn of Africa: A Legal History Perspective

OLINDO DE NAPOLI

3 Dutch Politics of Intimacy in Colony and Metropole and Their Afterlives: Reflections on a Shifting Political Economy of Intimacy

GUNO JONES

4 ‘What Does Our Love Have to Do with Politics?’: Regulation of Interracialized Couples in East Germany

CHRISTOPH LORKE

PART II Legal-Spatial Segregation

5 Regulating ‘Mixture’ while Building a Settler-Colonial City: The Case of Benghazi

ANDREA TARCHI

6 Policing ‘Zones of Degeneracy’: (Post-)Colonial Migrants and Interracialized Sex and Intimacies in France (1954–1979)

RÉBECCA S. FRANCO

PART III Regulation of Consequences

7 A ‘Marriage Between Natives’: Race, Religion, Citizenship, and Customary Marriage in Late Colonial West Africa

LUZ CRISTINA COLPA

8 Rationalizing Racial Mixing in French West Africa: From African and European to African and Caribbean Encounters with Empire

HILARY JONES

9 Gender, Citizenship, and Regulating Mixed Intimacies in West Germany

JULIA WOESTHOFF

10 Mixed-Race Children, Eugenics and Labels of Defect and Handicap in Britain, 1920s–1950s

LUCY BLAND

11 ‘The Obvious Dangers of this Relationship’: Interracialized Relationships between Underage Swiss Women and Italian Men and the Implementation of the Swiss Child Protection Laws (1960–1980)

MIRA DUCOMMUN

PART IV Migration Law

12 Regulating Interracialized Intimacies in 1950s–1960s Britain through Deportation and Immigration Policies

NAWAL MUSTAFA

13 Borders, Intimacy and Colonial Dispossession

JOE TURNER

PART V Shadow of Law

14 Improper Couples, Suspicious Mobilities: Sexuality as Currency and Stigma in Black-White Couples’ Everyday Lives in Europe

ELENA ZAMBELLI

15 ‘How Could I Have Been so Blind?’: Love, Money, and Victimhood in Transnational Interracialised Relationships between Dutch Women and Men from MENA Countries

IRIS SPORTEL

Afterword: Love, Domination, and All Things in Between

DEBRA THOMPSON

Biography

Elena Zambelli is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Maynooth University. Her research interests pivot on the commodification and regulation of sex and intimacy within and across national and racialized borders. Her publications include the research monograph Sexscapes of Pleasure: Women, Sexuality and the Whore Stigma in Italy.

Betty de Hart is Professor of Transnational Families and Migration Law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She studies the national, European and international rules affecting transnational families, their ideologies and the impact of law on the everyday lives of transnational families, with a particular interest in the genealogy of race thinking.

“Regulating Interracialized Intimacies is a multi-faceted, rare and rich contribution addressing racialized intimacies in a variety of settings, including Europe. Finally, our gaze is turned toward the continent which has historically been so maddeningly oblivious to its foundational role in inventing race!” 
Gloria Wekker, Emeritus Professor, Gender Studies, Utrecht University

 “This book engages in a critical examination of global understandings of “race” and racial identities and global regulation of interracial intimacies. It impressively cuts across the divisions between colonial, metropolitan, and postcolonial contexts, centering in on European contexts and showing the centrality of the regulation of interracial intimacies throughout.”
Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean and Ryan Roth Gallo Professor of Law, Boston University

“Illuminating the relationships between nation, law and race via interracial relationships, Regulating Interracialized Intimacies is a valuable interdisciplinary resource not just for scholars of ‘mixed race studies’, but also those who study race through comparative frameworks. Appropriately for the subject matter, it connects ideas and practices across time, space, Empires and legal systems.”
Steve Garner, Associate Professor in Sociology, Swansea University

“This stellar collection of essays by prominent international scholars originally contributes to the study on regulations of love and mixed relationships. Covering an astonishing wide spectrum, both historical and geographical, the volume challenges the study of race, gender and intersectionality in colonial, postcolonial and contemporary contexts in Europe and beyond.”
Sandra Ponzanesi, Professor of Media, Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Utrecht University