Dubai, the City as Corporation

Preface

PREFACE W ith this book, I try to bring a perspective informed by recent developments in cultural anthropology, the field in which I was trained, and Middle East history, a field in which I was not, onto the analysis of the ways Dubai has urbanized over the past decade. Although history is a field I frequently draw on in my research and in which I have abiding intellectual and teaching interests, this book is not meant to be a serious contribution to the historical literature on Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), or the Arab Gulf. The book is meant to be a contribution to the analysis of cultural and urban processes and the political factors that set the conditions in which these processes can occur. Although I have been hesitant to do so, I have found it necessary to proffer claims, in a prefatory manner, based on the acquaintance I attempted to make with certain relevant, primary and secondary historical materials treating the history of Dubai, the UAE, and other Gulf states, along with that of the wider Indian Ocean and Middle Eastern arenas. The (somewhat) historical section of the book, primarily chapter 1, is meant to establish the context for the conditions of cultural and urban process analyzed in the subsequent chapters. It is meant to be neither a contribution to the historical scholarship on Dubai nor an exhaustive, detailed review of the historical literature on Dubai or the UAE. What chapter 1, along with the rest of the book, does offer is a new interpretation of Dubai urbanism during the past decade. We are now familiar with stories and images of Dubai’s emergence, and more recently of its hard times. Like much of the scholarship on the UAE, these stories tend to take the perspective of the so-called winners and prominent PREFACE x institutions—the ruling dynasty, Western expatriates, etc. Work of a more critical persuasion tends to be produced by activists, such as Human Rights Watch. As valuable as this activist work is, it is not analytical social science . Like Anh Nga Longva working on Kuwait and Robert Vitalis on Saudi Arabia, I have attempted to bring the insights of social science to the demystification of social and state power as well as to the clichéd images of the city and culture in a Gulf society.Also new, I believe, are the ways in which I interpret Dubai’s urban spaces and built environment as connected to and mediating sociopolitical realities. In my usage, space is a polysemous term, referring to multiple phenomena, such as the representations of institutional actors (e.g., states and architectural and real estate firms); the spatial logics and territorializing discourses of the term “culture” in the usages of everyday Dubayyans; the types of governance enacted by powerful actors, such as, again, states along with parastatal corporations; and the appropriation and remaking of that governance by everyday actors. All of these connotations of space point in the direction of a kind of exercise of power that Michel Foucault has termed “disciplinary,” internal and productive of subjectivity and individual identity rather than external and constraining of individuals (Mitchell 2006, 178). To my knowledge, no one has yet looked at a specific society of the Arab Gulf in this way. Some of my interlocutors, to say nothing of Dubai officialdom, will perhaps take issue with a few of my claims, such as the existence and character of political contestation of definitions of modernity and urbanity in modern Dubai. In discussing a manuscript of one of the following chapters with me, a colleague based in the UAE made a comment that suggested that the book might cause misunderstandings. The colleague, an expatriate residing in Dubai, wondered why, if my critiques of the politics of the ruling Maktoum dynasty were true, did hundred[s of] thousands of people from across the globe—Arabs of all nationalities, Iranians, Indians, Pakistanis, and [Filipinos]; Americans; British; and scores of other European and Asian migrants labor so hard . . . to extend their stay and work in Dubai if the regime did not create relatively favorable living and work conditions particularly in reference to their own home conditions. Of course, my colleague has a point. Conditions in Dubai, even in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, are favorable relative to many other parts of the Middle East, SouthAsia, and even NorthAmerica and the British Commonwealth. For many expatriates, Dubai is a refuge, a place to improve life circumstances...