In this essay, I am interested in two problems: the ways in which the language of Freud has entrenched itself in the general field of colonial studies, and the tangled coexistence of Freud and Foucault, more specifically, in analyses of colonial racism. Racism and Europe's imperial expansion have often been analyzed with Freudian notions of sublimated and projected desire but what is more striking is that students of colonialism have often taken their readings of European sexual conduct in the colonies directly from colonial scripts themselves. Here I review some recent trends in imperial historiography and contrast them to the sexual politics of colonial states to suggest that sexual desires were structured by desires and discourses that were never about sex alone. Here I argue that cultivation of the European bourgeois self at once defined the interior landscapes of "true" Europeans and the interior frontiers of the superior polities to which they were constantly reminded they rightfully belonged.