From Golden Frontier to Global City: Shifting Forms of Belonging, “Freedom,” and Governance among Indian Businessmen in Dubai

Abstract

In this article, I consider how the Dubai government's shift in economic focus from maritime trade networks toward large-scale, Western-style multinational development projects threatened the forms of belonging that Indian merchants had carved out in the emirate during and after British colonialism in the region, and before

Domestic Work, Affective Labor, and Social Reproduction in South Asian America: A Tribute to Laxmi Soni

“…In fact, many of the findings of Ray and Qayum's work resonate with both the autoethnographic moments in this article and with my own work among Indian elites in Dubai, where I found a similar preference for perceived sameness in employment practices (both in businesses and within the home) and rhetorics of familial care and responsibility that masked the power differentials and modes of exploitation that occur within Indian diasporic latitudinal citizenship in Dubai (Vora 2011). In relation to Laxmiben's circuit of migration and my family's movement back and forth between the United States and India, we can see the recuperation of discourses of fictive kinship and ethnic sameness at certain moments that not only exert power but also mark intensified intimacy, responsibility, and desire for the social reproduction of Indianness within conditions of diaspora.…”

“…South Asian migrants to the Gulf, as discussed above, are analyzed primarily through a rubric of labor and not as diasporic subjects with affective, legal, or historical ties to the region. In the United States, however, we think of South Asians as occupying a particular positionality, one that assumes a post-1965 migration history, middle-class "model minority" achievement, and some form of permanent settlement (Vora 2013). Scholars have argued that this formulation of the South Asian diaspora also assumes a Hindu patriarchal normative subject who experiences identity pulls from two distinct cultural backgrounds, in addition to the generational tensions of raising children in a new country (Grewal 2005;van der Veer 2005).…”

“…The exclusions enacted by the diaspora literature are also found in community organizations as well, which often rely upon what Annanya Bhattacharjee (1999) calls a patriarchal "bourgeois" attitude that prevents discussion about class and gender in particular. While diaspora as a concept has been used to critique the assimilationism of US immigration studies, it relies upon privileged forms of settling and being transnational at the same time (Siu 2005;Vora 2013).…”

2008: “Open City” and a New Wave of Filipino Migration to the Middle East

“…Ethnographic studies have also emphasized Indian business leaders' infl uence on Dubai's economic development (Vora 2011). Indians have historically developed informal networks of Indians, especially Indians from Kerala (Osella and Osella 2012).…”

Dubai in the ‘Middle’

“…While much of the research underpinning my observations here has involved fairly extended participant observation and semi‐structured interviews between 2009 and 2013, my aim is to stress the importance of the mundane in the multiscalar dynamics of worlding and the depth of global city politics. This is, ultimately, a call to bridge global city analysis not only with the ‘ordinary’ city thesis but also with some excellent ethnographic accounts now available on the Emirate (Vora, ; Kathiravelu, ; Elsheshtawy, ).…”