Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina

Illicit sexual relationships in the 18th century reveal how ordinary people understood race and racial difference in North Carolina's growing slave society. Suspect Relations draws on vivid court-room testimony and travel literature to show how non-elite women and men--Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro-Americans--shaped developing meanings of race. Disorderly women and religious dissenters, rebellious slaves and indentured servants, unwed mothers and boastful bachelors speak in these pages. Their responses to sexual transgressions, including cross-cultural sex, 'illegitimate' families, sexual slander, and sexualized violence, served to contest but also to reinscribe the developing social order based on race. Moving beyond elite understandings of racial difference, this book shows how race came to seem real in a wide array of relationships that were as political as they were personal.