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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