Ancient Mixologies: Joel Augustus Rogers and Puzzling Interracial Intimacies

Chapter 6 engages interracial intimacies and racially hybrid identities through the work of Joel Augustus Rogers. Frantz Fanon is offered as a vindicationist interlocutor through the lineage of Négritude. Linking antebellum interracial violences with the evolution of the carceral state, this chapter pushes back against Rogers's defense of interracial intimacies as normative through an assessment of the ways that sexual violence and systemic sexual surveillance have been pillars of white supremacy and white heteropatriarchal expressions of hegemony. Anarchy is presented as an incomplete, but relevant (and potentially necessary) political rejoinder to contemporary US governance that renders democracy perennially anemic and racially offensive. Anarchy signifies a tragic hybridity—and, perhaps, hybridity calls forth a tragic anarchy—neither of which satisfies the demands of justice. The complexities of electromagnetism elucidate this puzzling justice.