Producing Diasporas and Globalization: Indian Middle-Class Migrants in Dubai

Through ethnographic examples, I explore two modes of diasporic subjectivity that I observed among middle-class Indian migrants in Dubai—racial consciousness and consumer citizenship. However, I argue that the alignment of academic and diasporic informants' understandings of mutually exclusive domains such as culture, nation, economy, and state lead to the relative invisibility of this large population in most literature on South Asian diasporas, and I point to a need to theoretically and methodologically begin our anthropological research with how and when domains become distinct for migrant subjects, rather than taking them as a priori forms.