Impossible citizens : Dubai's Indian diaspora / Neha Vora.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 221-234) and index.

Introduction -- Exceptions and exceptionality in Dubai -- Capitalism run amok? why the "Dubai story" is incomplete -- The "rentier" state: oil, development, and migration -- Multiple logics of governance -- Citizenship and its exceptions -- Exception and its exceptions: centering Agamben and Dubai in citizenship studies -- Substantive and latitudinal citizenship within Dubai's Indian diaspora -- Are Indians in Dubai diasporic? -- Waves of indianness: taking and making the nation overseas -- Logics of belonging and citizenship in diaspora studies -- A tale of two creeks: cosmopolitan productions and cosmopolitan -- Erasures in contemporary Dubai -- New Dubai and the production of global futures -- Selling Arabia: producing differentiated foreign subjects -- Making purified pasts: heritage, citizenship, and national identity -- The making of tradition -- An Indian city? diasporic subjectivity and urban citizenship in old Dubai -- Liminal diaspora, liminal nation -- India extended: geographies of similarity and difference -- Neither "expat" nor "laborer" -- Diasporic identifications and ambivalences -- Geographies of belonging and exclusion -- Between global city and golden frontier: Indian businessmen -- Unofficial citizenship, and shifting forms of belonging? -- We built this country? -- Freedom, cosmopolitanism, and re-export: Indian ocean networks -- The creek frontier: mercantilism, masculinity, and nostalgia -- Maneuvering neoliberalisms: monopolies of "freedom" in Dubai's gold industry -- Non-citizen kafeels -- Exceeding the economic: new modalities of belonging among middle-class Dubai Indians -- Dubai is like a bus, an air-conditioned bus: economic migration and middle-class ideology -- Racism and the failure of the free market -- Race and the making of the middle class -- Consumer citizenship, choice, and claims to the city -- Becoming Indian in Dubai: parochialisms and globalisms in privatized education -- DBCD: Dubai-born confused desi -- Producing parochialisms through education -- -- Globalized higher education in the Gulf -- Dissonance, discrimination, and diasporic subjectification -- Reassessing Gulf studies: citizenship, democracy, and the political -- Rethinking the political -- De-provincializing democracy -- Making diasporic futures.

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 comprise 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.