eBook - PDF

Impossible Citizens

Name: Impossible Citizens
ISBN: 9780822397533

Dubai's Indian Diaspora

Neha Vora,

English
PDF
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - PDF

Impossible Citizens

Dubai's Indian Diaspora

Neha Vora,

About this book

Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now compose its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness.

While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians—even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate—disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential—yet impossible—citizens of Dubai.

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Yes, you can access Impossible Citizens by Neha Vora in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Middle Eastern History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher

Duke University Press Books

Year

2013

Print ISBN

9780822353935, 9780822353782

eBook ISBN

9780822397533

Topic

Social Sciences

Subtopic

Middle Eastern History

Index

Social Sciences

FIGURE 

1.2

•

Sheikh 

Zayed 

Road 

from 

the

World 

Trade 

Center,

early 

1990s. 

∫

Gulf 

News, 

Dubai.

FIGURE 

1.3

•

Sheikh 

Zayed 

Road 

from 

the

World 

Trade 

Center, 

November 

2012.

Photograph 

by

Nitin 

Gogia.

42

•

CHAPTER 

1

FIGURE 

1.4

•

Computer-generated 

‘‘satellite 

map’’ 

of

Dubai’s 

projected 

development,

produced 

in

2005. 

Source: 

burjdubaiskyscraper.com.

(which 

was

once 

on

all

Dubai 

license 

plates), 

the

Burj 

Khalifa 

(the 

tallest

building 

in

the

world), 

an

indoor 

ski

slope, 

the

free 

zones 

of

Dubai 

Knowl-

edge 

Village, 

the

Dubai 

International 

Financial 

Centre 

(

difc

),

Dubai 

Me-

dia

City, 

and

the

World 

islands—are 

located 

for

the

most 

part 

between

Jebel 

Ali, 

the

industrial 

free 

zone 

on

the

road 

to

Abu

Dhabi, 

and

the

World

Trade 

Center, 

the

vantage 

point 

of

ﬁgure 

1.2, 

and

e√ectively 

the

previous

external 

limit 

of

the

city.

∞≤

While 

the

newly 

opened 

(but 

not

fully 

com-

pleted) 

Dubai 

Metro 

and

the

recently 

instituted 

Salik 

toll-road 

system

have 

made 

signiﬁcant 

improvements 

for

connecting 

‘‘new’’ 

and

‘‘old’’ 

Du-

bai, 

at

the

height 

of

my

ﬁeldwork, 

in

2006, 

these 

spaces 

were 

becoming

Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Exceptions & Exceptionality in Dubai
1. A Tale of Two Creeks: Cosmopolitan Productions and Cosmopolitan Erasures in Contemporary Dubai
2. An Indian City? : Diasporic Subjectivity and Urban Citizenship in Old Dubai
3. Between Global City and Golden Frontier: Indian Businessmen, Unofficial Citizenship, and Shifting Forms of Belonging
4. Exceeding the Economic: New Modalities of Belonging among Middle-class Dubai Indians
5. Becoming Indian in Dubai: Parochialisms and Globalisms in Privatized Education
Conclusion: Reassessing Gulf Studies: Citizenship, Democracy, and the Political
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About this book

Frequently asked questions

Information

Table of contents