Domestic Tensions, National Anxieties: Global Perspectives on Marriage, Crisis, and Nation
Kristin Celello and Hanan Kholoussy
Abstract
Since the late nineteenth century, fears that marriage is in crisis have reverberated around the world. This book explores this phenomenon, asking why people of various races, classes, and nations frequently seem to be fretting about marriage. Each of the twelve chapters analyzes a specific time and place during which proclamations of marriage crisis have dominated public discourse, whether in 1920s India, midcentury France, or present-day Iran. While each nation has had its own reasons for escalating anxieties over marriage and the family, common themes emerge in how people have understood an ... More
Since the late nineteenth century, fears that marriage is in crisis have reverberated around the world. This book explores this phenomenon, asking why people of various races, classes, and nations frequently seem to be fretting about marriage. Each of the twelve chapters analyzes a specific time and place during which proclamations of marriage crisis have dominated public discourse, whether in 1920s India, midcentury France, or present-day Iran. While each nation has had its own reasons for escalating anxieties over marriage and the family, common themes emerge in how people have understood and debated crises in marriage. Moments of marriage crisis often originate and are infused with concerns about sociopolitical and/or economic upheaval, shifting gender roles and behavior, the porous line between public and private, the clash between tradition and modernity, and expressions of national identity. Collectively, the chapters reveal how diverse individuals have deployed the institution of marriage to talk not only about intimate relationships, but also to understand the nation, its problems, and various socioeconomic and political transformations.
Keywords:
marriage,
crisis,
law,
nation,
nationalism,
law,
interdisciplinary,
tradition,
modernity,
gender
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199856749 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2016 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199856749.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Kristin Celello, editor
Associate Professor of History, Queen's College, CUNY
Hanan Kholoussy, editor
Associate Professor of History and Middle East Studies, American University in Cairo
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