The Color of Sex

“[S]avvy insights, combined with lucid accounts of a hegemonic identity uneasily triangulated amid racial contamination and gender confusion, make it an indispensable guide for anyone revisiting that ground.” - Russ Castronovo , American Literary History

“Stokes offers a smart and compelling demonstration that literary scholars must understand the antithetical racist pressures African American authors faced . . . . To buttress his arguments, Stokes provides sustained, insightful readings of such forgotten works as Charles Jacobs Peterson’s anti-Uncle Tom novel The Cabin and the Parlor (1852) and Metta Victor’s Maum Guinea and her Plantation ‘Children’ (1861), as well as better-known works by Charles Chesnutt and Thomas Dixon.” - D. J. Rosenthal , Choice

"[A] smart and provocative book . . . delivered in prose that is always lively and sometimes elegant . . . . The Color of Sex is a fine book, not only for what it shows us about whiteness and heterosexuality but for how it does so." - Adele Perry , Journal of the History of Sexuality

"[A]mbitious . . . . [T]here is no doubt that the source material is invaluable. . . . [T]he book clearly makes a contribution to existing scholarship by reference to newly unearthed and reconsidered historical material and will be of interest to the many scholars for whom whiteness studies is a concern." - Jennifer DeVere Brody , Journal of American History

"Stokes has made an important contribution to emerging scholarship on the entanglements of racial and sexual identity." - Diane McKay , American Literature

“A stunningly conceived, lucidly written, well supported, nuanced, and absolutely compelling analysis of a culturally repressed and underanalyzed body of important literary materials. Stokes demonstrates with amplifying brilliance the operative interdependence of whiteness and normative heterosexuality.” - Dana Nelson, author of National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men

“An engaging and well written exploration of nineteenth-century ‘fictions’ of white supremacy that manages to combine wit and erudition.” - Gayle Wald, author of Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth Century U.S. Literature and Culture