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.
This lecture is supported by the S.W. Brooks Visiting Fellowship. All are welcome to attend. The event is free.
Register: events.humanitix.com/2026-sw-brooks-public-lecture
About the Speaker
Professor Fermanis will present a paper titled Beyond the Pocahontas Perplex: Intimacy, Sex, and Grief in the Australian Interracial Romance, exploring how representations of Indigenous women in nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian fiction have been shaped by the enduring cultural myth of the Native American princess. Drawing on settler fiction from both Australian and transnational contexts, the lecture examines how interracial romance narratives have both reflected and reinforced colonial constructions of personhood, intimacy, and grief before turning to contemporary novels by Anita Heiss, Melissa Lucashenko, and Richard Flanagan as counterpoints that move beyond these inherited frameworks.Professor Fermanis is an internationally recognised scholar of nineteenth-century literature. From 2016 to 2021, she was principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded SouthHem project and is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic book series The New Nineteenth Century. Her latest monograph, Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820–1890, was published by Oxford University Press in 2026.