Beyond the Pocahontas Perplex: Intimacy, Sex, and Grief in the Australian Interracial Romance

About the lecture

The conceptual starting point of this paper is what Rayna Green has famously called the ‘Pocahontas Perplex’ or the perplexing fixation that the Euro-American imagination has with the Native American princess. Interrogating the unstable princess/squaw dichotomy on which this fixation depends, the paper begins by placing the Australian interracial romance in transnational context. On the one hand, it argues for the importance of Pocahontas as a reference point for overdetermined representations of Indigenous women in nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian fiction. On the other hand, the Australian interracial romance, unlike the US model, tends to reject race union as a symbolic basis for affective nationality, reflecting a widespread reluctance among Australian settlers to portray Indigenous women as the idealised, easily acculturated figures of literary romance and thus as ‘founding mothers’ of a new Australian nation. More broadly, the paper argues that the interracial romance reveals the constitutive role of intimate attachments in evolving conceptions of autonomous liberal personhood in Australia. It considers the extent to which settler romances such as William Anderson Cawthorne’s Kangaroo Islanders (1854) and Hume Nisbet’s Savage Queen (1891) represent love as what Elizabeth Povinelli has called an ‘intimate event’ that privileges individual freedom over collective tribal love, thereby consolidating a construction of personhood that hinges either on the abjection of Indigenous collectivities or on their limited recognition by the state. Within this construction of autonomous personhood, Indigenous Australian women are represented as deviant, inassimilable, and/or disposable subjects, who are unable to embody ideas of autonomous selfhood or attain the status of grievable lives. The paper closes by reflecting on how settler writing dismisses, deflects, ventriloquises, and/or commodifies Indigenous grief, as well as considering how contemporary novels by Anita Heiss, Melissa Lucashenko, and Richard Flanagan re-write narratives of Indigenous women's lives by moving beyond the Pocahontas Perplex.

Event details

Date: Wednesday 1 July 2026
Time: 5:30pm for 6pm lecture, followed by light refreshments from 7-8pm
Location: Room 227, 308 Queen Street, UQ Brisbane City (view map)

All are welcome to attend our free event.

Enquiries: engagement@hass.uq.edu.au

About our speaker

Porscha Fermanis is Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature at University College Dublin. From 2016-21, she was principal investigator of the 'SouthHem' project funded by the European Research Council. With Omar F. Miranda, she is co-editor of the book series, The New Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury Academic). Her latest book is Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1890 (Oxford, 2026).

This lecture hosted by UQ's School of Communication and Arts is supported by the S.W. Brooks Visiting Fellowship.

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Contact the host of 2026 S.W. Brooks Public Lecture - Professor Porscha Fermanis