Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora

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Marian Aguiar analyzes arranged marriage as a transnational cultural phenomenon, revealing how its meaning has been continuously reinvented within the South Asian diaspora of Britain, the United States, and Canada. She advocates situating arranged marriage discourses within their social and material contexts to see past reductive notions of culture and grasp the global forces mediating increasingly polarized visions of agency.

Reviews

"With this timely and interesting book, Marian Aguiar locates arranged marriage on a spectrum between coercion and choice, against the tendency to read it off at the two extremes. By contextualizing it historically and geographically she shows us how arranged marriage has changed over time and according to place."Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University

"A timely feminist intervention in the Orientalized preoccupations with arranged marriage in the West, Marian Aguiar has given us a lucid and fresh account of arranged marriage, taking readers through the concepts transnational circuits. The rich archive assembled hereliterature, film, court cases, state documentsis sure to unsettle preconceived Western notions of arranged marriages. What follows is a measured, insightful commentary on questions of consent and agency, but also labor, migration, state power, and national belonging."Jyoti Puri, Simmons College

Author Bio

Marian Aguiar is associate professor of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She is author of Tracking Modernity: Indias Railway and the Culture of Mobility (Minnesota, 2011).