Review of 'Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil'

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Jan 2, 2024 Arabian Peninsula
Review of "Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil"

Review of "Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil"

By : Rohan Advani

[This review is part of the latest volume of the Arab Studies Journal! Read the ASJ's editors' note and the table of contents here.]

Andrea Wright, Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022). 199 pages. $28.00 Paperback.

Studies of migrant labor in the Persian Gulf often generate stereotypical images of Indian men caught in a Faustian bargain: compelled to leave their homes and loved ones in search of employment, or worse, unwittingly ensnared in cycles of debt and exploitation. Andrea Wright’s Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil is a timely intervention that examines how Indian men seek jobs and make meaning of their lives both in the Gulf and back home.

Between Dreams and Ghosts challenges popular narratives that uncritically point to either the kafala system, Gulf political culture, or labor surpluses in India as the sole reason for the exploitative conditions faced by migrant workers in the Gulf. While all of these factors are important, Wright also traces contemporary patterns of migration to others, ranging from the history of oil companies, the legacies of colonial capitalism, and practices of recruitment and subcontracting firms. More recent critical scholarship has complicated simplistic push-pull explanations of Indian migration to the Gulf, but it lacks granular analysis of who is migrating, why they do so, and how. Wright overcomes this problem by following the work of recruiting agencies in northern and central India as well as oil companies and contracting firms in the Gulf.  She draws upon extensive field work carried out in both locales, including interviews with workers, their families, recruiting agents, and managers, in addition to participant-observation at recruiting agencies in India and work sites in the Gulf. Considering the topic, these aspects of the book are surprisingly rare in other works.

The book begins with a historical overview of Indian migration to the Gulf and notes how contemporary issues of Indian emigration were shaped by British imperial officials’ and postcolonial nationalists’ concerns about labor control and protection. As Wright notes, “this vision of the vulnerable Indian continues to inform the logic of emigration itself” (38). It also details how Indian workers are hired through recruiting agencies and the different ways that such agencies select Indian men as subjects suitable for migration. Wright then looks at the different ways that Indian workers in the Gulf maintain ties with their families and communities back home, while simultaneously forging their own narratives about oil in the age of climate change, global inequality, and discrimination in contemporary India. Lastly, Wright considers the history of managerial practices by oil companies in racially segmenting workers and undercutting worker solidarities. She also examines how oil companies maintain profits and circumscribe their own liability in the event of accidents and deaths via layers of subcontracting and safety laws.

Details about Indian recruiting agencies will be of particular interest to scholars of the Gulf who may be less knowledgeable about the intricacies of caste, class, and religion in the Indian labor market and the particular mechanics of labor recruitment. For Wright, the labor market for Indian migrant workers is a constellation of highly local but fragmented networks that are usually obfuscated by mechanistic notions of “sending countries.” Rather than theorizing this networked approach to labor recruitment, Wright describes agents mobilizing their own networks to recruit the “right” type of interviewees for their clients, i.e., workers who have already worked in the Gulf or embody a particular spirit of entrepreneurialism that reflects recruiters’ beliefs about the middle-class work ethic and “India’s brand.” Moreover, since many migrant laborers in unskilled or semi-skilled positions come from India’s rural heartlands, recruiters come to rely on their own networks of subagents who have the type of local knowledge, status, and networks to penetrate these areas. Local geographies, trust, and gifts also facilitate these relationships.

Wright does not, however, fall into the trap of romanticizing these network ties as social relations untouched by predatory capitalism. As she notes, “individuals are not envisioned as equals within the system, and recruiting agency employees and subagents repeatedly invoke and reinforce social hierarchies” (73). In fact, she argues that local subagents are often more exploitative than professional recruiters in urban centers. By uncovering the details of the recruitment process, the book convincingly makes the case that migration should be seen as an outcome of more micro-level sociological—and even psychological—phenomena, such as dreams, familial obligations, gifts, and network ties. Yet, while Wright challenges the notion that Indian migration to the Gulf can be explained by uneven labor supplies in India and the Gulf, the specter of labor surpluses nonetheless looms large throughout the book. She vividly portrays long queues of men with somewhat desperate dreams of being interviewed, willing to sign contracts they do not always understand. The book would have benefited from examining whether migrants’ sacrificial aspirations and dreams are actually products of surplus labor.    

Turning to the relations between migrant workers and their communities back home, in the chapter “Making Kin with Gold,” Wright argues that gold—just like blood, semen, or breast milk—serves as a “connective substance” among kin. Indian workers in the Gulf purchase gold to help their sisters in India get married, and in doing so, maintain their natal family ties, reinforce gender roles, and perform an alternative masculine ideal (instead of getting married themselves). Far from being a timeless tradition, in Wright’s telling the significance of gold in Indian kinship relations is historicized as a modern phenomenon. Before the implementation of colonial tax laws, dowries were often immovable assets, such as land, which was considered the property of the woman. But following efforts by the British authorities to extract taxes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dowries increasingly took the form of moveable assets like gold. This change had the unintended consequence of the control of capital moving easily between a bride’s father to her husband or parents-in-law. Moreover, with the rapid influx of gold from the Persian Gulf to India following Indian independence in 1947, the purchasing of gold for dowries also served as a connective substance between these two regions. Gold purchased from the Gulf was widely seen as “pure” and more likely to retain its value than other assets. In this chapter, Wright cogently demonstrates how gold-as-dowry “is actually shaped by liberalization, contemporary statecraft, and transnational migration” (103).

The book also unravels the layers of subcontracting firms on which oil companies rely to hire workers. Subcontracting firms seek to create an army of interchangeable workers who can move from project to project with relative ease. Wright notes that workers also come to internalize the drive to homogenize labor through processes of self-disciplining. The net effect, however, is that oil companies deflect responsibility onto managers and labor contractors in the event of accidents, while “workers are forced to take on the risks that historically companies held” (169). Wright also astutely points out that focusing on individual accountability and errors of low-level management obfuscates the role played by extensive contracting in making such projects less coordinated and riskier. Moreover, she demonstrates that “subcontracting, from a neoliberal perspective, is a way to create mini-markets that are most efficient and better able to address their specific niche” (168). As such, Wright suggests that subcontracting firms are the labor market, reinforcing her view of the labor market as a series of differentiated, unequal, and profit-driven organizational forms and network ties. But labelling the entire subcontracting process as “neoliberal” actually limits the power of her own rich ethnographic detail, which provides fascinating insights into how oil companies, subcontractors, and workers constantly negotiate risk and responsibility. Moreover, since Gulf-based firms have engaged in both extensive subcontracting and vertical integration during the neoliberal period, further research could explore when and why oil companies choose to engage in subcontracting, and whether those that do not subcontract have different labor relations.

Here, Wright’s use of terms such as “neoliberalism” and “entrepreneurialism” tends to get in the way of the analysis. For example, Wright labels the use of Hindu symbolism by workers to self-discipline and promote safety practices as “Hindutva” (the contemporary form of Hindu nationalism in India)  and “neoliberal.” Yet it is unclear why the deployment of symbols from a broad Hindu cultural matrix is specifically “Hindutva” and why “self-discipline” is uniquely neoliberal, especially given Gandhi’s insistence on the latter principle. Similarly, there are numerous instances of supposedly neoliberal practices—such as emigration regulations—that are steeped in a colonial logic, but it is never explained what makes them specifically neoliberal and why certain colonial logics resonate so deeply with contemporary neoliberal practices. Since it touches upon the period of early Indian state building only briefly, the book does not investigate whether such practices may have as much to do with post-independence Indian developmentalism as with British colonial governance. While the legacies of colonial capitalism certainly shape today’s migratory patterns, the book could have developed an analysis of why and how certain colonial practices persist without collapsing colonial and postcolonial histories (see Agarwala 2022). 

Nonetheless, Wright is one of the very few researchers to have a foot in both regions. Scholars of the contemporary Middle East will benefit immensely from engaging with this book, as it helps us better understand the internal cleavages among migrant populations, the transnational ties binding these two regions, and the cultural and political worldviews forged by workers through the process of migration. Undoubtedly, Wright has produced a highly innovative and rigorous ethnography of Indian migration to the Persian Gulf. This book will certainly be of use for teaching undergraduate and graduate students of anthropology, migration, Middle Eastern studies, and South Asian studies.
Jun 30, 2021 Lebanon
Darcie Fontaine By :
Darcie Fontaine

Review of Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930

Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 (Cornell University Press, 2019).

[This review was originally published in the Spring 2021 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

Historians of gender, sexuality, and empire have long been at the forefront of the scholarly effort to analyze how the Western obsession with the sexuality of both white and non-white women has shaped modern class, race, and gender hierarchies across the world. Historian Judith Surkis’s new monograph Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria presents a tremendous new addition to this field, as she demonstrates that the Orientalist sexual fantasies at the heart of the French colonial project in Algeria were central to France’s effort to maintain sovereignty over the Muslim population of its most important colony. More specifically, Surkis argues that French fantasies about Algerian Muslims’ sexual behaviors and Islamic law—particularly as it pertained to issues of polygamy and child marriage—were not just fantastical French representations of the “Other.” Using case studies of what she describes as “multiple moments of legal uncertainty” in the first century of French colonial Algeria (1830–1930), Surkis analyzes how French sexual fantasies about Algerian Muslims shaped the practice and writing of colonial law in French Algeria (9). These fantasies, she argues, provided the affective basis for the construction of a complex legal framework in colonial Algeria that facilitated both the expropriation of Algerian property and the French regime’s marginalization of Algerian Muslims from French citizenship.

Surkis describes her book as an attempt to “reconstruct the ‘cultural life’ of Algerian colonial law” (8). One of the great achievements of this book is that it forces us, through its creative use of sources, to think differently about the Algerian colonial archive. Although historians of gender and empire have notably led the effort to “read against the grain” of the colonial archive, Surkis’s book is one of the first to apply these approaches to the analysis of the French empire, and specifically the Algerian colonial context. Her source base includes a fairly exhaustive survey of the existing French-language archives of colonial Algeria and legal treatises of the period, surveys of numerous journalistic and academic sources, and most intriguingly, salacious romance novels written by French lawyers working in Algeria during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet Surkis also brings her training in feminist and critical theory to her study of “legal Orientalism” in nineteenth-century Algeria (13). She clearly draws inspiration from the significant body of scholarship on gender, sexuality, and empire, which, with a few notable exceptions, has not made its presence felt in the broader historiography of colonial Algeria, a field that has been dominated by more traditional social history in recent decades. More directly, she adapts Jacques Lacan’s description of “extimacy,” or the “fascination with and jealousy of the Other’s excessive sexual pleasure that reveals deep-seated but unrecognized desires within the self ” (16) to analyze what she describes as the “negated memory of Muslim law in French law” (18).

The first half of the book explores the interconnected issues of sovereignty, property expropriation, and the development of colonial legal structures in Algeria in the aftermath of the French conquest in 1830 that enabled the creation of distinct legal categories for “French” and “Muslim” personal status and land. Surkis argues that in the immediate aftermath of the conquest, the uncertainty about French sovereignty and control over Algerian territory led officials to invest in law as a means to symbolically organize the chaotic landscape and legitimate the French claim to Algeria. An 1834 ruling enacted the new system of dual tribunals, in which Muslim jurists and Jewish rabbis (until rabbinical tribunals were abolished in 1841), who became French government officials, oversaw matters relating to “religious law” and “civil status” for indigenous Algerians. Yet French law still had primacy over Muslim and Jewish law in Algeria, and Surkis uses specific cases to illustrate how gender—and specifically issues of family law—shaped the constantly evolving power dynamics between French authorities and Algerian Muslims during the early decades of colonization.

Despite upholding a basic level of authority for Muslim law, the French saw it as a symbol of Muslim inferiority. Surkis analyzes how polygamy became a “sexualized symbol of native legal difference” (55), defined as “decadent and primitive” (56) in contrast to the French Civil Code, which defined marriage as the engagement of two individuals. This seeming incompatibility between the “civilized” secular French law and the primitive, sexually deviant Muslim law was codified through the 1856 Senatus-Consulte, which declared that Muslim and Jewish “indigènes” of Algeria were subjects, rather than citizens, of France and could only become citizens through the full renunciation of their personal status (i.e., adherence to shari‘a or Mosaic law) and the adoption of the French civil code. The material consequences of this legal distinction can be seen in the implementation of the 1873 Warnier Law, which assimilated Algerian property law into French civil law but maintained Muslim “personal status and inheritance” as a separate legal category (most Algerian Jews had been assimilated as French citizens through the 1871 Crémieux decree). In other words, property was assigned to territory, but “personal status” was assigned to bodies; even if an Algerian Muslim left Algeria for France, their citizenship status would remain tied to their “personal status” or their adherence to Islamic law. As the Warnier Law was designed explicitly to facilitate the transfer of Algerian property into French hands, this distinction forced French officials to legally define who held the title to Algerian properties, which involved defining “Muslim families” within a structure that was legible to the French.

The second half of the book explores the issue of legal reform. Although some reformers sought to extend political rights to Algerian men in exchange for military service in the early twentieth century, French fantasies about the sexual rights of Muslim men and their incompatibility with French law and values continued to dominate discussions over citizenship, rights, and the reform of colonial law. While French discourses, from jurists in Algeria to metropolitan feminists, saw the “plight” of oppressed Muslim women as the target of reform, Algerian Muslim elites spoke up in defense of Muslim law and culture, in some cases directly addressing French Orientalist fantasies at the root of reformist projects. These are the subjects of the final two chapters of the book, and the space where Surkis drives home the point—largely through her analysis of civilizational discourses about Muslim sexuality and marriage customs in romance novels and popular fiction—that these fantasies functioned most effectively at the level of elite discourse. She argues that because it was French jurists themselves who wrote these “sentimental fictions,” they illustrate how colonial law itself drew on feelings and fantasy as much as reality.

One key question the book raises, however, concerns the issue of race, and more specifically, how the relationship between French Orientalist sexual fantasies and colonial law influenced the development of a racial conception of Algerian Muslims. Surkis carefully avoids directly using the term race, despite building a significant body of evidence and an analytical framework that specifically illustrates the evolution of French discourses on Algerian Muslims as a racial category, rather than just a religious minority. This is particularly evident in her analysis of the implications of both the 1865 Senatus-Consulte and the 1873 Warnier Law on the embodiment of Muslim “personal status,” which she discusses over multiple chapters. She analyzes, for instance, how French colonial officials frequently rejected the assimilation of Algerian Muslims into French society due to their adherence to “incompatible” sexual “privileges” such as polygamy, child marriage, and repudiation. Yet cases of religious conversion illustrate that the converts maintained their originary personal status, despite their change in religious status. Thus, an Algerian Muslim convert to Christianity became an “indigène Catholique” rather than a French citizen. Likewise, a French woman who converted to Islam did not automatically become an “indigène,” as this status belonged solely to those born in Algerian territory. Surkis describes this situation as an “ethnicized understanding of personal status,” and makes the case that this is tied directly to the secular nature of French law, in which conversion was a matter of personal belief, rather than legal status, and became bound directly to Muslim bodies rather than territory (186). Considering that historians have long been analyzing similar processes of European antisemitism against Jewish populations during this same period as the development of a specifically racial mythology about Jews, it is somewhat disconcerting to see this ongoing attachment to the narrative that the French systems of discrimination against Muslim Algerians—which are documented in great detail in this book—were only about religion, rather than race.

Nevertheless, Surkis’s analyses also offer up important new paths for further research, including the consideration of other spaces we might look for evidence of Algerians working within and against colonial law, and what opinions we might find about the reform of “backward” customary law among less elite Algerians. More broadly, this book’s introduction of gender and sexuality into colonial Algerian history brings a wave of new energy to the field. Yet scholars who work outside of the geographical boundaries of the Maghreb and the French empire, and particularly those working in the global history of gender and sexuality, will appreciate its combination of rigorous archival research and theoretical insights; it is a book that will certainly serve as a model to future scholars.