Afterword

Abstract

ABSTRACT This Afterword to the Special Issue on ‘Marriage Migration, Family and Citizenship in Asia’ seeks to foreground some key themes from the six articles it contains. Drawing on some old conceptual friends of the field – including Appadurai’s model of disjunctive global ‘scapes’ and flows, and Plummer’s notion of ‘Intimate Citizenship’ – it highlights particularly significant contributions to understanding processes and practices of citizenship connected to marriage migration, through attention to diversity, continuity, and disjuncture. The disjunctures documented here encompass tensions between processes not just at the level of family and the nation, but between national and inter- or transnational dynamics – highlighting inequalities in intimate citizenship, but also providing potential spaces for change and agency. This rich collection therefore represents a substantial contribution to a foundational issue in the literature on marriage migration – the question of how to conceptualise the agency of marriage migrants, who paradoxically manage the agentic leap of migration at the same time as being profoundly dependent on their citizen spouses, with the well documented potential for victimisation this dependency contains.