Placage Complex

Plaçage was a system of formalized domestic and sexual partnerships between white men and free women of color in colonial Saint-Domingue and Louisiana, often involving negotiated arrangements and material support. The later "plaçage complex" — the romanticized myth of the quadroon ball and the tragic mulatta — was a post-revolutionary projection, largely created through New Orleans print culture and travel writing, that reorganized older and more varied arrangements into a neat, saleable script. That script obscured marriage, intra-community family strategy, and the active economic role women played as ménagères.