Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia by Ann McGrath (review)

WHEN HISTORIANS TACKLE THE TRANSNATIONAL, they most often do so across nation-state borders, comparing India with Pakistan, or France with Germany, for example. Ann McGrath expands our sense of the transnational to look at the workings of nations contained within one country—here, the Cherokee and the United States, and Aboriginal people and Australia. McGrath's goal is not to create a direct comparison, as much divides these two locales: geography, place-making, time period, and culture, to name just a few. Instead, McGrath seeks to examine both colonization and resistance through the lens of marriage, and argues that it is in the micro, intimate history of a place that we can best see the fractures in colonialist policy.

The micro-histories that make up the first four chapters of the book are particularly strong. McGrath takes single relationships—Harriet Gold and Elias Boudinot in 1820s America, John Ross and Mary Bryan Stapler in the United States of the 1840s, Ernest Gribble and Jeannie in Australia at the turn of twentieth century—and demonstrates that the personal is unavoidably political when one is marrying not only across color lines but across national borders. McGrath anchors us in the most private correspondence—courtship letters and confessional prose written to close friends—unpacking these sources to demonstrate the larger fortunes of the colonial enterprise. We become party to the places where Cherokee and Aboriginal people undermined the colonial experiment by holding fast to their own ideas about marriage, gender, land, and power. We see the places where settler colonists worked violent change on landscapes, peoples, and ideas with the force of their racial beliefs—by removing both the Cherokee and Indigenous Australians from their ancestral homes, for example. We become familiar with the ways in which resistance could manifest in the choice of a sexual or romantic partner, in the decision to have a child, or in the place a person lived—it was not simply enacted through the business of treaties and war. Marriage exists at the heart of a tangled web of personal choices and national policy, argues McGrath, making it the perfect vehicle to explore nation-making and unmaking in settler-colonist states.

McGrath's focus enlarges in the third and fourth sections of her book to analyze policies that had an effect on wide swathes of people, while still being anchored in the idea of marriage. She examines the Australian government's policy of inquiring into an Aboriginal woman's consent to marry a non-Aboriginal partner, the practice of polygamy in the United States and Australia, and the Cherokee nation's policies regarding intermarriage between non-Native men and Cherokee women (and vice versa). In each instance, she demonstrates the limits of the settler-colonial state to create the "pure" nation that so many white supremacist thinkers wanted, as well as the limitations of national sovereignty among Cherokee and Aboriginal peoples' to police the physical and affectionate boundaries of their cultures. With marriage as our focus, we see the untidiness of the settler-colonist venture, the practice of nation-making and maintenance, and the weak spots in imperial and national designs.

That the case studies at the heart of this volume are not directly comparable does make for some cognitive hiccups—one cannot help but search for comparisons where none are meant. But in thinking about marriage as a researcher's tool, a magnifying glass that causes cracks and fissures to pop into focus, the book has much to recommend it as a think piece in exploring how marriage might transform what we think we know about sovereignty, imperial incursions, and Indigenous resistance to the same.