Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries

Situated in the methodologies of transnational history, cultural history and the history of emotions, Transnational Coupling in the Age of Nation Making during the 19th and 20th Centuries examines and compares courtship and marriage patterns that occurred between France and the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. Because the social practices of courtship and marriage became mechanisms through which borders were crossed and new cultural spaces were created, these relationships represent important elements of transnational entanglements. This work, therefore, seeks to examine not only the ways in which observable patterns of transnational marriage emerged out of social spaces of cross-cultural encounter between the two societies but also how the dynamics of those encounters changed over time. While existing scholarship on the subject has pointed to obvious socio-economic motivations for these marriages,Nicole Leopoldie contends that such rationalizations are simply too narrow and that greater analytical considerations need to include both cultural and emotional motivations that were always in the background. By locating and identifying transnational spaces that produced marriages and analyzing the cultural and emotional dimensions of those spaces, she argues that marriage participants were largely driven by a strong emotional attachment to perceived cultural differences that stretched beyond the national polity. Within the shifting global contexts of the 19th and 20h centuries, these marriages, therefore, provoke important questions regarding family formation, the role of marriage in the making of national cohesion and belonging, and the permeability of national borders during different stages of the national project.