Settler genocide is contagious! Ge Tang, ‘Contagious Racial Antipathy: Negotiating Indigenous Genocide Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873)’, in Nina Engelhardt, Anja Hartl (eds), Victorian Antipathies: Negative Feelings in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Book, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 201-219 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler genocide is contagious! Ge Tang, ‘Contagious Racial Antipathy: Negotiating Indigenous Genocide Anthony Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1873)’, in Nina Engelhardt, Anja Hartl (eds), Victorian Antipathies: Negative Feelings in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Book, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 201-219

10Aug26

Abstract: I mobilise an analysis of the violent antipathy that Anthony Trollope’s travel writing mediates towards Indigenous Australians to illuminate the under-acknowledged history of genocide in Queensland, a history which, I argue, the author seeks to downplay. Trollope’s expression of profound antipathy towards the racial other stemmed from a collective antipathy pervasive within Queensland’s settler community, but it was also connected to his own corporeal experience of the Australian bush. Trollope’s antipathetic feeling towards the land’s custodians governed his engagement with earlier travel accounts about Australia by his predecessors; his writing, in turn, amplifies and disseminates this emotion, shaping how readers perceived Indigenous Australians and their suffering under British colonisation.

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