Travels and Travails of Settler Colonialism in Queer Natal

Abstract

T. J. Tallie’s intricate historical work at the intersection of queer theory and critical indigenous studies maps late nineteenthcentury Natal as a shifting, anxious field of play where settler colonial governance and African indigenous resistance are in a tempestuous embrace. Tallie sets the stage of settler colonial encounter in Natal, where a former Dutch trade outpost transformed into a British colony (through conquest of Zulu and Dutch militaries) that is never able to recruit the white European settler population it needs to establish majority rule. The colony’s inability to establish majority settler rule and secure European settler reproductive futurity animates the settler/African Indigenous tensions that Tallie traces through the critical axes of race, gender, and sexuality. Queering Colonial Natal is a critical intervention into the fields of African studies, settler colonial studies, and queer theory. As Tallie argues, the “critical study of settler colonialism” has not been “widely applied to Southern Africa in gender and Natal in particular” (3). Equally as innovative are the transnational turns the book takes as it compares settler colonial regimes in the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to trace the ways that these modes of genocide and settler governance shaped British imperial and settler colonial rule in Natal. Tallie reads an array of archival material including legislation, minutes from legislative proceedings, court transcripts, civil servant reports, missionary correspondences, minutes from a 1910 teacher’s conference, and Englishand Zululanguage news-