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How the rhetoric of monogamy was weaponized against Indigenous and queer lives by colonial powers in the nineteenth century

While marital monogamy is often posited as inevitable and essential, it was in fact a negotiated practice inflicted onto occupied lands to enforce social control and white settler reproduction. Conjugal States makes an ambitious and far-reaching investigation of how colonizers used monogamy to symbolize modernity, weaponized against Indigenous communities in South Africa, New Zealand, and British Columbia—and how this process was complicated by the emergence of the Mormon Church.

In Conjugal States, T.J. Tallie reveals how the queer destabilizing potential of Mormon polygamy in the nineteenth century clashed with the broader aims of colonization, resulting in legal action against plural marriages and fears of Mormon “contamination” in other settler spaces. As colonial powers attempted to delineate and justify their occupation, monogamous marriage became a key method of performative civilization. By analyzing the fraught debates concerning gender, marriage, belonging, and race that arose between British settlers, Christian missionaries, South Asian migrants, and Indigenous peoples in contested territories around the world, Tallie reveals how marital practices and prohibitions shaped the contours of colonial life.

A deeply archival work, Conjugal States illuminates how both monogamous marriage and colonial power were predicated on the precarity of their own control. Tallie tells the story of the enormous repercussions of this global phenomenon, providing a history of sexuality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous peoples that charts varied forms of native resistance to settler incursions.

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How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces?

In Queering Colonial Natal, T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes “queered” indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy; restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship; and assigning only Europeans to government schools. 

Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natal’s white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. 

Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each group’s claim to authority.