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  • The limits Of Love and Law Across Nations
  • Erika Pérez (bio)
Ann McGrath. Illicit Love: Interracial Sex & Marriage in the United States & Australia. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. xxxi + 503 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00.

In this impressive study of the history of intermarriage in U.S. and Australian settler-colonial societies, Ann McGrath analyzes marriage as a site of nationbuilding, contested sovereignties, and the formulation of a "marital middle ground" due to frontier conditions in which neither colonizers or the colonized signified "a homogenous entity" (p. 24; p. 22). Although McGrath maintains that hers is a transnational history and not a comparative one, she deftly draws occasional comparisons and makes distinctions in the experiences of Aboriginal peoples in North Queensland, Australia, and the Cherokees of North America pre- and post-removal, who are a central focus of her research. For example, in chapter eight she notes that Australian bureaucrats were inspired by U.S. Indian removal and reservation policies and emulated some of these actions. She also notes that Aboriginal peoples in Australia did not have treaty relationships with the Australian government or court recognition of sovereignty like the Cherokees and other indigenous groups in the United States. Consequently, assertions of sovereignty played out differently among First Nation peoples in Australia and the United States. She shows, however, that even in violent frontiers and in the face of removal, reservations, and death, Cherokees and Aboriginals used creative strategies and personal agency to negotiate interactions with white settlers, to assert their own cultural values, and to disrupt the United States' and Australia's efforts to claim "perfect sovereignty" during key periods of nation-building: specifically, the mid-nineteenth century in the United States and the early twentieth century in Australia (p. 4).

McGrath builds on existing historiography about intermarriage by Peggy Pascoe, Nancy Cott, Sylvia Van Kirk and others, as well as consulting linguistic and anthropological works, Indigenous studies, legal studies, and scholarship on transnationalism and settler-colonialism. Her primary sources consist of families' archives, personal memoirs and diaries, newspapers including the Cherokee Phoenix, popular cartoons, paintings, government documents, scientific studies, photo albums, and Aboriginal peoples' oral histories, to name a [End Page 260] few. Conceptually, her work is influenced by Michel Foucault's ideas about state biopower, Richard White's "middle ground," and she employs novel methods such as analyzing Indigenous dreaming stories and songlines to ascertain whether the concept of consent existed in Indigenous languages. At various points, she expresses scholarly concern for maintaining the privacy of individuals and communities by noting that she sought permission to disclose family secrets and images.

Challenging the notion that interracial unions involving Indigenous peoples were always temporal, McGrath argues "that the marital middle ground was a generative, enduring phenomenon," but also a way to achieve colonial aims of conquest by more subtle, but still powerful, means than outright violence (p. 25). Marriage and the legitimacy of offspring, she maintains, acted as important areas of contestations of sovereignty and help us to better understand nation-building and constructions of citizenship. McGrath frames her work by maintaining that indigenous or First Nation groups considered themselves nations in their own right. When we read about individuals' efforts to come together for love, desire, companionship, or material incentives, despite originating from different nations, she urges us to think of these people as border crossers, thereby expanding conceptions of transnational history to include affective ties.

McGrath organizes her book in four parts consisting of two chapters each: "Secrets of New Nations"; "Marriage and Modernity among the Cherokees"; "Queensland's Marital Middle Ground"; and "Embodying New Worlds." Chapter one examines the marriage between Harriet Gold, a Connecticut-born Congregationalist, and Elias C. Boudinot (Buck Watie), an elite Cherokee student from the South who attended the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, which the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) administered. Boudinot and Gold's marriage, and the tensions leading up to it, revealed that settler-communities viewed white women as "territorial boundary markers of empire" and that "no amount of Christianity or successful gentlemanly performances, oratory, or literary ability could make an 'Indian' deserving of a white woman...

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