About

Marian Aguiar is an Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research and teaching focus on postcolonial studies, border studies, mobilities, diaspora, and global gender studies. She has authored the book 'Tracking Modernity: India's Railway and the Culture of Mobility,' which considers representations of India's railway and the imagination of colonial and postcolonial space and movement. Her second book, 'Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora,' examines culture and agency in the South Asian diaspora through legal, literary, media, and film narratives of arranged marriage in the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. She is also the co-editor of 'Mobilities, Literature, Culture,' the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars' engagement with mobilities scholarship, and is involved in editing the Palgrave Macmillan's 'Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture' series. Her forthcoming book, 'Errant Mobilities: decolonial imaginaries of Mediterranean sea migration,' explores representations of refugees and migrants' movements in the borderspace of the Mediterranean Sea.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Law
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Science
• Computer Science
• Communication
• Aesthetics
• Psychology
• Art

Selected publications

• Drift

  Transfers · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The maritime refugee subject is constituted through the mobility of drift. This article interprets the representation of drift mobilities in Nam Le's 2008 story, “The Boat,” lê thi diem thúy's 2003 novel The Gangster We Are All Looking For , and Ocean Vuong's 2019 novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous . It argues that these Vietnamese diasporic writers reinvent the image of “boat people,” severing it from its imperial past and authoring a new politics of belonging to oceanic movement. Le, lê and Vuong use representations of drift and maritime migration to challenge dominant post-war mobility narratives constituting a liberal subject of freedom. In the process, they reveal diasporic imaginaries that move fluidly between the past and the present, and between Vietnam and its diaspora.

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• Afterword

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
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• Afterword

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2023-03-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Anxieties of Interdisciplinarity

  South Asian Review · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Social Science

  Anxieties provoked by interdisciplinarity have been part of broader ideological disputes about the legitimacy of boundaries. This essay looks at how critics have uncovered how the structures of the academy limit or direct interdisciplinary efforts, and the ways these connections impact the allocation of the university’s intellectual, labor, and material resources. It then turns to look more specifically at the field of South Asian studies in the United States. It offers a critical history of contemporary discussions about interdisciplinarity especially as they took place in the humanities, and contextualizes those conversations taking place within South Asian studies programs and curriculum. Inspired by the scholarship that relates interdisciplinarity to the neoliberal university, it considers how new interdisciplinary development in these programs has increasingly been aligning with neoliberal projects of globalization within the academy, and connects those developments back to the field’s early history. As a way of analyzing the stakes and relevance of interdisciplinarity for South Asian studies specifically, this essay thinks through how the project has been set up at the intersection of spatial constructions – a crossroad of traffic – and posits using metaphors of movement to retain the political viability of interdisciplinary processes.

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• Salvaging hope: Representing the objects of Mediterranean migration

  Emotion, space and society · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Sociology

  This article contributes to a scholarly conversation about humanitarianism and the representation of refugees by interpreting how and why visual artists use maritime safety objects to intervene in the European migrant crisis. The amalgamated detritus of life jackets, parts of rubber dinghies, and other refuse from migrant crossings that have been left behind on the island of Lesbos, Greece have inspired contemporary artistic interpretations. This article argues that images and installations of emergency floatation devices mobilize affective qualities associated with maritime survival objects as a way to convey the promise and failure of contemporary nation-states to maintain humanitarian goals toward refugees. Analyzing Ai Weiwei's film and installations in Central Europe as a case in point, this article argues that representations of such devices draw critical attention to discourses of crisis, emergency, safety, and waste. This article challenges the idea that these kinds of object-centered artistic works further marginalize refugees. It proposes instead that such works function as powerful mediators in bringing together places proximate and distant from the scene of crisis, and in doing so promote a kind of ethical solicitation for change. Looking critically at these projects, this article closes by assessing the possibilities and limits of such object-centered appeals.

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• The Temporary Graveyard of Migrant Labor

  Rethinking Marxism · 2020-07-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This essay explores the contributions of Amitava Kumar's Bombay-London-New York. I argue that Kumar furthers the field of academic memoir by focusing on the material sites of production. Referencing the fiction of postcolonial studies, Kumar offers an important reminder about the limits of representation in describing the experiences of global labor.

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• Mobilities, Literature, Culture

  2019-01-01 · 33 citations

  book
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• Introduction: Mobilities, Literature, Culture

  2019-01-01 · 24 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Arranging Marriage: Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora

  2018-01-02 · 5 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

• Arranging Marriage

  University of Minnesota Press eBooks · 2018-01-02 · 7 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
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Frequent coauthors

• Terry Phelps

  Laguna Pharmaceuticals (United States)

  9 shared

• Megan Eatman

  Clemson University

  9 shared

• Erin Mulhern

  Carnegie Mellon University

  9 shared

• Kathleen Cleaver

  9 shared

• Nathan Kreuter

  Carnegie Mellon University

  9 shared

• Christian Shippee

  Carnegie Mellon University

  9 shared

• Nyssa In

  The University of Texas at Austin

  9 shared

• Marilyn Coulson

  Carnegie Mellon University

  9 shared