Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora provides the first sustained analysis of 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. Aguiar identifies and analyzes representations of arranged marriage in an interdisciplinary set of texts—from literary fiction and Bollywood films, to digital and print media, to contemporary law and policy on forced marriage. Aguiar interprets depictions of South Asian arranged marriage to show we are in a moment of conjugal globalization, identifying how narratives about arranged marriage bear upon questions of consent, agency, state power, and national belonging.

Marian Aguiar is an Associate Professor of English in Literary & Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Aguiar’s fields of expertise include culture and globalization, postcolonial studies, and feminism, with particular interest in the study of South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. Her most recent book, Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora (University of Minnesota, 2018) looks at gendered cultural narratives produced in transnational contexts, identifying how narratives about arranged marriage bear upon questions of consent, agency, state power, and national belonging. Her work now continues to explore both transnationalism and the imagination of movement with her current book project Refugee Mobilities and as co-editor of the Palgrave McMillan book series Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture.

This program is presented in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of English.