The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

A history of how a descriptive color term became a sexualized political symbol and how free women of color from Saint-Domingue were folded into U.S. racial-political discourse, particularly through the refugee waves following the burning of Cap-Français in 1793. Clark argues that the retrospective plaçage story has obscured the lives of actual women who married, negotiated contracts, managed households, and transmitted property; her distinction among the ménagère, the later plaçage complex, and the quadroon figure is one of the cleanest tools for this subject. The book shows how the Haitian Revolution intensified American racial anxiety and how that anxiety was displaced onto a foreignized female figure rather than confronted in U.S. slavery itself.