“A Dangerous Precedent”: Monogamous Marriage as Immigration Infrastructure

Miriam Gleckman-Krut, Harvard University

The British South African colony of Natal (1843–1909) regulated polygamy in efforts to impose its racial capitalist designs onto indigenous communities. In the process, monogamy assumed the imperial ideal. My argument is that the Union of South Africa (1910-1948) repurposed the logics of monogamous marriage in its founding immigration restrictions. It did so to meet a twentieth-century racial capitalist goal: the stemming of Indian women’s immigration to South Africa. This novel comparative historical analysis animates how I read South African, Indian, and British archival records on the immigration of “plural wives.” I show that the handful of Muslim men who attempted to bring multiple wives into South Africa in the early twentieth century navigated what were once imperial associations with polygamy. As they did so however, those associations reconfigured in response to the threats that Asiatics were seen to pose to European control. The effect was on the one hand to expand the sociolegal conceptualization of “polygamy;” Europeans used it to encapsulate and obfuscate a growing range of racialized economic anxieties. The process also refined the category of “monogamous marriage,” which legally came to stand-in for early white ideals. A first contribution is to analytically connect largely distinct South African historiographic research. More broadly, I posit that marriage should be understood as integral to countries’ immigration infrastructures. I draw attention to how marriage, on the one hand, is a product of historic intimate regulations. Once marital regulation is installed in immigration policy however, it becomes a bureaucratic means of asserting emergent national interests. In the case of South Africa, this framework clarifies that monogamy’s role in migration policy echoed its colonial predecessor: it configured gendered citizenship in service of maintaining regional European dominance. Immigration policies that privilege monogamy might in this way be read as an afterlife of imperialism.

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 Presented in Session 72. Intimate Rule: Gender, Marriage, and the Colonial State