T.J. Tallie
T.J. Tallie is an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of San Diego. He completed his PhD in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign under the direction of Dr. Antoinette Burton. His research interests include imperialism, settler colonialism, indigeneity, African history, gender studies, queer theory, and religion.
My scholarly work specifically focuses on the nineteenth-century southern African colony of Natal, a contested space between British settlers, isiZulu-speaking Africans, and Indian migrants. My forthcoming book, Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), uses queer theory and critical indigenous studies examine how discourses of European civilization underpinned colonial legislation that policed white settler behavior and attempted to consign indigenous Africans and Indian migrants to subservient positions within Natal. I suggest that the colonial state ‘queered’ indigenous practices by defining them as threats to the normative order they attempted to impose through delimiting Zulu polygamy, restricting alcohol access, and assigning only Europeans to government schools. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. For example, Parliamentary reports reveal that while settler marriage laws imposed monogamous, heterosexual unions as the only legitimate form of matrimony, local populations asserted the legitimacy of their own polygynous institutions in colonial courts. I argue that settler colonial regimes queered normative African practices as a threat to institutions predicated on correcting indigenous custom and establishing European hegemony. Similarly, settler non-monogamy was also designated queer, viewed as fundamentally subversive to the sexual project and racial order established under colonialism.
My current research project, tentatively titled Conjugal States, examines how the concept of monogamy became deeply linked to the idea of white settler reproduction in South Africa, British Columbia and New Zealand in the context of the incipient ‘threat’ of polygamy practiced by the emergent Latter Day Saint movement in nineteenth-century Utah. My work interrogates the centrality of reproductive futurity to marriage in nineteenth-century settler societies. Through this work, I will provide a history of sexuality, settler colonialism, and indigenous peoples that charts varied forms of native resistance to settler incursions.
My scholarly work specifically focuses on the nineteenth-century southern African colony of Natal, a contested space between British settlers, isiZulu-speaking Africans, and Indian migrants. My forthcoming book, Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), uses queer theory and critical indigenous studies examine how discourses of European civilization underpinned colonial legislation that policed white settler behavior and attempted to consign indigenous Africans and Indian migrants to subservient positions within Natal. I suggest that the colonial state ‘queered’ indigenous practices by defining them as threats to the normative order they attempted to impose through delimiting Zulu polygamy, restricting alcohol access, and assigning only Europeans to government schools. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. For example, Parliamentary reports reveal that while settler marriage laws imposed monogamous, heterosexual unions as the only legitimate form of matrimony, local populations asserted the legitimacy of their own polygynous institutions in colonial courts. I argue that settler colonial regimes queered normative African practices as a threat to institutions predicated on correcting indigenous custom and establishing European hegemony. Similarly, settler non-monogamy was also designated queer, viewed as fundamentally subversive to the sexual project and racial order established under colonialism.
My current research project, tentatively titled Conjugal States, examines how the concept of monogamy became deeply linked to the idea of white settler reproduction in South Africa, British Columbia and New Zealand in the context of the incipient ‘threat’ of polygamy practiced by the emergent Latter Day Saint movement in nineteenth-century Utah. My work interrogates the centrality of reproductive futurity to marriage in nineteenth-century settler societies. Through this work, I will provide a history of sexuality, settler colonialism, and indigenous peoples that charts varied forms of native resistance to settler incursions.
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