Impossible Citizens: Dubai's Indian Diaspora

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In this book I argue that although Indians cannot become legal citizens of Dubai, an Arab city-state on the Persian/Arabian Gulf, they are in many ways its quintessential citizens.' Indian foreign residents' everyday practices, performances, and narratives of existing within the city are integral to understanding larger questions about the nature of governance, citizen- ship, neoliberalism, and cultural identity in this small but globally important place. In Dubai, as in all contemporary urban spaces, human elements, geographies, and institutions are co-constitutive, and forms of belonging and citizenship take place at several scales beyond the juridicolegal definition of "nationality."

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a mythology began to develop around Dubai, driven by the emirate's many exceptionalities: it was a conservative monarchy with one of the most open markets in the world; although located within the United Arab Emirates (UAE), one of the largest oil-producing countries, it had successfully diversified its economy away from oil reliance into tourism, real estate, and finance; and it managed to balance seemingly divergent temporalities of traditional Bedouin pasts and postmodern, futuristic cityscapes. Newspaper articles, television shows, and travel guides chronicled the meteoric rise of Dubai, the rapidly shifting geography of the city, and the armies of exploited workers-mostly from South Asia-that were constructing it. The ethnographic entry point for an academic interested in entanglements be- tween South Asia and the Gulf seemed almost obvious at the beginning of the century, as the South Asian presence in the Gulf was defined almost entirely through accounts of human-rights violations and economic exploitation of the poorest strata of laboring classes, usually construction workers or maids. However, my mythology of Dubai was not of this century, nor was it rooted primarily in a story of capitalism and development.