“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
"McGrath simultaneously provides a broad examination of intermarriage law on two continents and breathes life into the intimate relationships forged between men and women of many races and communities. . . . Illicit Love is a powerful testament to the power of personal stories to complicate our understanding of larger historical processes."—James Joseph Buss, Western Historical Quarterly
"Superbly written."—Liz Conor, Aboriginal History
"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."—Catherine J. Denial, Native American and Indigenous Studies
"A valuable and arresting work of scholarship."—Pacific Historical Review
“Read this book to explore both the direct and the twisted paths linking marriage and sovereignty, in richly detailed case studies spanning two disparate continents on both of which racial hierarchy characterized settler colonialism.”—Nancy F. Cott, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Harvard University
“Superbly researched and imaginatively presented, McGrath’s reconstruction of stories of marriages and sexual intimacies across the lines of race and domination between settler-colonial and indigenous peoples in the U.S. and Australia, is a remarkable instance of interleaving of the two ‘national’ histories. . . . This doubly trans-national history has an unmistakable element of freshness about it that readers will no doubt welcome.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth
“Ann McGrath’s brilliant history of intermarriage in the new nations of America and Australia reads like a novel. She uncovers hidden stories of forbidden love between settlers and Indigenous men and women that both shaped and confounded the colonial project. Writing in a style as tender as the very intimacies she describes, McGrath has created a model of how to wed private with political histories.”—Margaret Jacobs, author of White Mother to a Dark Race and A Generation Removed
“Ann McGrath reminds us that ‘weddings’ have long mixed politics and intimate passions in the interests of family, tribe, and nation. Heart-wrenching stories and subtle distinctions are laid bare in fine prose, and we find the kinship between Australia and the United States even closer than we might have thought.”—James F. Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
“This is a convincing and lively analysis of how marriage helped create the modern nation. Using case studies from the Cherokee Nation and northern Australia, McGrath deftly makes the case for the key role played by marriage in settler colony histories. McGrath’s moving account is transnational history at its best.”—Philippa Levine, author of The British Empire, Sunrise to Sunset and Gender and Empire
