Description:
Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and colonizers in times of nation formation.
Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and how it came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. A tour de force of settler colonial history, McGrath's study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged.Review Quotes: "The real drama in Illicit Love lies with the lovers, in relationships, not regulations. . . . McGrath's 'love'--both for and between her characters--gives a depth to this fresh and sometimes dazzling book that must resonate with us all."--Lisa Ford, American Historical Review
-- (9/20/2017 12:00:00 AM)