Melbourne launch of 'Illicit Love' by Prof. Ann McGrath

Launch of Ann McGrath's Illicit Love: Interracial Sex & Marriage in the United States and Australia.

By Professor Marilyn Lake, University of Melbourne with Dr Liz Conor, ARC Future Fellow, LaTrobe University.

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.

The book sheds new light on how colonizer states were constituted, and how certain marriages and their children were classed as illegitimate and illicit. Reserves severed the marital middle ground and wrenched families apart.

Illicit Lovereveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. This study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged.

Please register for this free event via Evenbrite