“A Group of like-Minded Lads in Heaven”: Everydayness and the Production of Dubai Space

ABSTRACT:

While the Arab Gulf’s imperial geography has been recognized at the level of geopolitics, little if any work has connected empire to the daily, human geographies of the region. Scholarship on the intersection between urbanism and empire has tended to emphasize issues of surveillance and governance, assuming, whether intentionally or not, an imperial, “birds-eye” point of view. Such an approach both leaves much interesting material out of the analytical frame and privileges so-called central or major imperial cities. This essay proposes another frame for imperial urbanism, based upon Lefebvre’s related notions the “production of space” and “everyday space.” The author takes as a case study the city of Dubai, and specifically its spaces of “bourgeois gratification”—“British pubs,” gated communities, shopping malls, and resorts. He argues that these demonstrate how the city has been as profoundly shaped by its imperial legacy as have more recognizable imperial cities. Dubai today, and for a long time, has been a place where British and other Western expatriates feel that they can “escape” the stresses and constraints of life in the West. He shows that this is as much a product of the imperial encounter as are more recognizable products of empire, for example monumental architecture.

Dubai Marina, as seen from the Palm Jumeirah Island. Photo by Yasser Elsheshtawy.

Notes

A central figure, for Lefebvre, in this connection is that of the poet, who enacts and (as another utopian Marxist, Ernst Bloch might say) anticipates the utopian future. For example, Lefebvre interprets even the most mundane objects, kitsch, and bric-a-brac as the “derisive poetry men and women make use of to remain poets” (Lefebvre, , p. 83). “Childhood, adolescence and young adulthood,” he writes, “deficient in reality, clumsy, pretentious, even stupid … are incomparably rich with the greatest and most deceptive form of wealth: possibility” (Lefebvre, , p.84; see also Bloch, ). Of course, one must situate this utopian streak within its proper place: it is mostly inarticulate and suppressed, a glimmer, in the dialectic of capitalist urbanization. Though utopia glimmers as possibility, it is not inevitable. It requires critical thought and action to materialize. Although Lefebvre’s notion of the everyday is inspired by existentialism—Heidegger and Sartre “hover” over it (Smith)—it is important to point out that Lefebvre is at the same time deeply critical of what he considers the nihilistic implications of existentialism. Existentialism turns everyday life into “nothingness,” he writes (Lefebvre, [1947], pp. 124–125), whereas the “true critique of everyday life [ … ] will imply a rehabilitation of everyday life” (Lefebvre, [1947], p. 127, emphasis Lefebvre’s).

For a similar example from the Arab Gulf, see Vitalis (). When I use the terms “imperial” or “colonial” in this essay, I am referring to the dialectical process similar to that which Chopra () calls “the joint enterprise” of colonial and local elites attempting to produce a certain kind of urban order. These terms refer to processes, not to reifications or objects that one can unproblematically label “the imperial city” and so forth. Thus, when I discuss Dubai as an imperial or postcolonial city, I am highlighting it as a place deeply affected and shaped by the encounter with the British Empire. This may nevertheless still strike some readers as an exaggeration. Against my claim, it might be pointed out (correctly, in my view) that the British considered Dubai a “backwater” and that it is not “imperial” in the sense that more recognizable examples of imperial urbanism, such as Algiers, Bombay, Delhi, Rio De Janeiro, and others are. I have no argument with this line of critique. The purpose of this essay, however, is not to argue that Dubai was an imperial center, or similar to its more famous and important counterparts, or that it is exemplary of some ideal type of the imperial city. This is a worthwhile conversation, but for a very different kind of essay. My aim here is more modest: to point out that the imperial encounter, roughly from the latter half of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, and especially in times of intensified geopolitics, such as the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s or the discovery of oil in the 1960s, left significant traces on the ways in which Dubai space has taken shape even to the present day. During this imperial period, it is true that most British imperial bureaucrats did not expend much energy thinking about Dubai or the wider Trucial States (as the contemporary United Arab Emirates were called by the British). But small, “insignificant” places still tell important stories about how empire works and what effects it leaves as part of its legacy (see Vine & Jeffery, , for a discussion of the importance of “unimportant” places in the analysis of empire). As discussed in the body of the essay and in great detail elsewhere (e.g., Davidson, ; Kanna, 2010; Kanna, ), the British Empire, by means of its Political Offices in Bushehr, Iran, and later in Bahrain, exercised immense influence in a wide variety of spatial and political contexts in the Trucial States. These range from British-designed transportation networks and other infrastructures, to de facto legal systems favoring Western and especially British expatriates in the labor market, to the very form and structure of the UAE state, which took on the design the British intended at independence in 1971: “tribal,” federated, and dependent on Western patronage (see the detailed analyses by Abdulla, , and Davidson, ).

The British imperial presence in the Gulf is, today, a thing of the past, replaced by the (arguably) more heavy-handed, militarized presence of the United States. Like other countries of the Arab Gulf, the UAE hosts the U.S. military, is a launching pad for imperial interventions in the Middle East, and is considered a front line both in Washington’s project of hegemony over regional oil supplies and confrontations with Iran. However, U.S. influence on the everydayness—the spaces, popular culture, and so on—of Dubai is not as strong as it has been on that of Saudi Arabia, where it directly controlled the oil industry until the 1970s, or Kuwait (or even Jordan, as a colleague with long experience in that country tells me). In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, one sees many more American cars, a higher proportion of American chain stores, and a larger imprint by American popular culture. In Dubai, the British presence is relatively stronger, with consumer brands for example catering more to a British audience and with British or British Commonwealth professionals being a far more visible presence in the private sector.

See also McSwiggen () for an excellent review of design and the objectification of class relations in industrial and postindustrial capitalist societies.

I have treated the development of notions of Emirati Arab ethnic identity in great detail elsewhere (see Kanna, ). With the beginning of the oil economy in the 1970s, large numbers of expatriate workers, the majority from South Asia, came to work in the UAE. It was in this context of a demographic “imbalance” (khalal sukkaniyy), as it is often called in the UAE, that a European notion of ethnicity or race was transposed onto local traditions of asl or genealogy. Increasingly, as it came to form a basic building block of the oil-based distributive welfare state, “Arabness,” like “Britishness” before it, came to be understood as lacking in porosity and as “property” (see Marable, , for a discussion of race as property in the U.S. context).

The rulers of the UAE state are the royal family of Abu Dhabi.

Of a total population of approximately eight million, only up to 20 percent are citizens, or Emiratis.

Of a Dubai population of approximately 60,000 during the late 1960s, Britons numbered under 450. Though they still make up only roughly 1% of the population, in the first decade of the twenty-first century the Dubai British population grew to about 100,000, with the UAE having the eleventh highest population of British expatriates in the world (Coles & Walsh, , pp. 1320–1321).

See Kanna () for a survey of Gulf anti-regime politics and Davidson () and Kanna () for detailed accounts, respectively, political–historical and anthropological, of Dubai.

Not least its critique of orientalist discourses which explain Emirati politics (and Gulf politics more broadly) by reference to “tribalism” and national-scale mappings of political economy, that is, treating the UAE or the Gulf as disconnected from global political–economic processes.

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In other words, it would be a mistake to conflate discourses of respect for local Muslim customs with conservative, traditionalist, or patriarchal voices. “Ya‘ny” literally means “it means,” but is usually a phatic and indeed emphatic utterance in most dialects of Arabic. Thus, here, it is meant to emphasize the utterance “it’s enough,” and to communicate a sense of despair.

Although good statistics are unavailable, non-Emirati Arabs are a significant group in the UAE, constituting between 20% and 25% of the population. These Arabs are not, usually, citizens but rather expatriates, though they often receive preferential treatment when seeking naturalization. They represent many of the countries of the Arab region. Among the more prominent groups are Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians.

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Notes on contributors

Ahmed Kanna

Ahmed Kanna is Assistant Professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of the Pacific. He is the author of Dubai, The City as Corporation (2011, Univ. of Minnesota Press) and editor, with Xiangming Chen, of Rethinking Global Urbanism (2012, Routledge). His articles and essays have appeared in City, Cultural Anthropology, Interface, MERIP, TDSR, and in the forthcoming Routledge Cities of the Global South reader. His current work is on the various types of expertise—urban, architectural, military—in the encounter between global north and global south, imperial metropole and imperial periphery.