Race and desire in the porno-tropics: ethnographic perspectives from the postcolony

In this article I explore the limits of Anne McClintock’s conceptualization of the ‘pornotropics’ as a concept to understand the everyday lives of an isolated group of European expatriates working for a logging company in the Congolese rainforest. Based on long-term ethnographic research, I give a reading of two sets of images I encountered during my fieldwork – a soft-erotic calendar and a hardcore porn site – to come to a better understanding of the actual discourses and practices of interracial sex along the racial divide. To get a grip on the economy of desire at my fieldwork site, I focus on two figures who are largely overlooked by McClintock’s analysis: the continuing influence of the white woman as an ‘absent presence’ in the post-colony and the ambiguous presence of the black man as both an emasculating body and a resource in the construction of ‘white’ masculinities.status: publishe