Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora
November 26, 2013
Indian communities have existed in Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai’s huge construction boom. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, they cannot become legal citizens of the UAE. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to Dubai’s economy. Yet even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and consider India their home. This lecture draws on ethnographic research to explore how these multiple and conflicting logics of belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity.
Neha Vora
Author, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press Books, 2013); Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology & Sociology, Lafayette College
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