Arranging Marriage

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

• ContentsPrologue: Oh! Calcutta!Introduction: Plasticity, Hybridity, and Postcolonial Biology1. “No Escape from Form”: Saleem’s Spittoon, Padma’s Musculature, and Neoliberal Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children2. Shibboleth: Hybridity, Diaspora, and Passing in Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist3. Doyle Plays Sherlock: Julian Barnes’s Unofficial Englishmen, Arthur and GeorgeEpilogue: The Good LifeAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

"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 concept’s transnational circuits. The rich archive assembled here-literature, film, court cases, state documents-is 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