Marriage Without Borders offers a striking ethnographic portrait of marriage and kinship in an increasingly transnational Senegal. Weaving together data gathered in Senegal, Italy and France over the span of nearly a decade, Dinah Hannaford describes the emergence of migration as an economic and social imperative for young Senegalese, and she elaborates the implications this has for domestic life and intimate relations. Her rich account does not privilege the migrant as the central actor in this story, but instead gives equal weight to the aspirations and experiences of the jabaaru immigré (migrant's wife). What results is a unflinching analysis of lives, finances and kin networks stretched tenuously across continents.

Rather than celebrating transnational family life as a ‘sentimental choice or an opportunity afforded by technology’ (130), Hannaford instead probes the everyday predicaments in which married couples, extended families and non-migrants find themselves. In an era of economic volatility, migration abroad emerges as a critical means of affording marriage rites and providing for a family in Senegal – and thus of achieving adulthood and social respectability. Yet men and women alike find that these transnational couplings are riddled with uncertainty and frustrations: Migrant men living in meagre conditions spend years separated from the families they worked so hard to establish. Women marry men of lower economic or social standing, with whom they may share little in common, simply because they are migrants. Highly anticipated family reunions are instead filled with anxiety, confusion and disappointment, as couples realise they do not know each other deeply or intimately. And wives find themselves living in tense, even abusive circumstances with their in-laws. In this way, Marriage Without Borders joins a growing body of literature that theorises ‘suspension’ – rather than flow or connection – as a defining experience of contemporary transnationalism.

What distinguishes Hannaford's contribution is her insistent focus on the everyday miscommunications and obfuscations that help to perpetuate this condition of suspension. The first chapter, for instance, considers how the diaspora comes to be imagined as a site of fantastic wealth accumulation and grand possibility, despite the often grim realities of life abroad. In the chapters that follow, we meet men who gripe that their wives do not understand their lives and sacrifices, even as they work hard to keep details about their work, living conditions and infidelities secret, and we meet women who silently endure their husbands’ affairs and their in-laws’ and co-wives’ abuses because good wives are expected to demonstrate discretion and stoic patience. In what is perhaps the most compelling chapter of the book, Hannaford explores how communications technologies – assumed by many scholars to enable connection and facilitate a kind of virtual intimacy – tend instead to undermine trust, generate misunderstandings and exacerbate loneliness and hostility in transnational households.