Quadroon Figure

The quadroon figure was a racial and erotic stereotype — the light-skinned free woman of color — that circulated in colonial travel writing, fiction, and later US and European popular culture. The figure took shape through racial taxonomy, refugee politics from Saint-Domingue after 1791, print culture, and commercial repetition. Moreau de Saint-Méry's obsessive racial classifications and Jefferson's fears of racial mixing both contributed to a larger project of reducing people with complex lives into symbolic racial fractions and assignable sexual types.