Rana AlMutawa, Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai (University of California Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Rana AlMutawa (RA): The book was borne out of many frustrations—I was frustrated by the Orientalist narratives about places like Dubai, especially because I found these narratives much more subtle than the common Orientalist discourse which is easier to spot and critique. For instance, given that the Gulf states are relatively wealthy, it was as if it was “appropriate” to engage in Orientalist narratives about them in ways that are by now unacceptable for other places. I was also frustrated by the practices of social distinction that manifested in conversations about places like Dubai, wherein some individuals showcase their disdain for the city as a way to present themselves as more socially and politically aware as opposed to the supposedly more “superficial masses.”
I was angry at the way that inhabitants of so-called illiberal cities were depicted mostly as alienated victims seeing their cities changing without their consent, rather than ordinary people— who you could find in any other place—making do and adapting to their environments, sometimes because they have to, but also making meaningful experiences, connections, and relationships within this environment. Finally, I was frustrated by the ways that the academic literature depicted inhabitants to only have meaningful interactions with their city when they were somehow engaged in at least subtle acts of resistance towards the spectacle, or rejecting it somehow. These narratives privilege resistance as the only form of agency and depict individuals who do not appear to resist almost as brainwashed, lacking in deep engagement, as “superficial.”
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RA: The book addresses three inter-related themes, “authenticity,” belonging/exclusion, and agency. When people talk about Dubai as a “superficial” city, they expect that inhabitants must be alienated there. In such narratives, inhabitants are depicted almost as victims in cities changing beyond their consent, lacking in agency. The book addresses these themes as well as many subthemes under them, such as cosmopolitanism, social hierarchies, and inequality.
The idea that Dubai is “inauthentic” has various roots. One of them is Orientalism. For instance, Dubai’s critics may point to the large, new developments as spectacles; however, when they go to Europe, they are in awe of the spectacles there—large palaces and churches, for example—and view them as examples of these countries’ rich histories and cultures. In reality, these were spectacles built for similar reasons as those in Dubai, such as to showcase wealth and power. Similarly, some critique Dubai for not being “Middle Eastern” or “Islamic” enough, viewing it as too modern and globalized. At the same time that they criticize it for being too modern (and therefore inauthentic), they also criticize it for not being modern enough. They claim that its modernity is a “fake” modernity, that “real” modernity is in the West, in “real” global cities or cosmopolitan cities such as New York or London.
Some academics, artists, and others I label as the “creative class” push back against these Orientalist authenticity debates, yet they may engage in problematic binaries of fake/authentic themselves. Practices of social distinction are evident; for example, when the creative classes critique the “glitzy” city for being too “inauthentic,” and the people who enjoy this part of the city to be superficial. These binaries often exoticize and fetishize the older and poorer parts of the city, and dismiss the newer and “glitzy” parts of the city as meaningless spaces.
This was why it was important for me to highlight the forms of belonging that take place in shopping malls: to demonstrate that inhabitants do make meanings within the spectacle. These “superficial” places are important cultural sites: ones where people go to see and to be seen by members of their community; where people have memories from their childhoods; and where social and gender norms are observed and negotiated. For instance, the colored abaya was seen as taboo for women at a certain point a few years ago, but it has become more and more normalized over time, partially because they were seen being worn in places such as malls.
Inhabitants making meanings within the spectacle is a form of agency in itself. The literature often presents acts of resistance as the only legitimate form of agency. Feminist scholars such as Saba Mahmood pushed back against these narratives in feminist discourse. Similarly, inhabitants may feel alienated by the rapid changes in the city, but that is not their only relationship to the city. For instance, some interviewees I spoke with critiqued new developments in the city as being too Western and too foreign, saying they feel they do not belong in their own country when they are in these places. But at other times, they go there because they like feeling anonymous; because they like feeling that they are “not in Dubai anymore;” or because it reminds them of “being in Europe.” People have very complex relationships towards the city that cannot be understood simply through supportive/oppressed/resistance narratives. Rather, inhabitants make meanings even in places they may not favor, and that is in itself a form of agency.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RA: I hope that both academics and non-academics read this work and that it can lead to more discussions about how we can write about and understand complex questions. I have been struggling with many of these questions myself. For instance, some researchers have asked how we can speak about the social meanings and forms of belonging in places like shopping malls, knowing these are neoliberal spaces that foster various forms of inequality. I hope that the book can generate more debate about how to go about understanding and writing about these places without reproducing the trope of inauthentic Gulf cities, reducing the experiences of the individuals who belong to them, or overlooking the exclusions that occur in these places—and in the hierarchies that enable their existence.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
RA: I wrote about state constructions of authenticity in my previous work. While there is a lot of literature on how states construct ideas of an “authentic” national culture, there is much less scrutiny about how academics, as well as intellectuals, artists, and the creative classes, do the same. This is part of what this book addresses.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
RA: I am at the early stages of a project on lifestyle migration and the experiences of middle-class racialized minorities.
J: Your ethnography is about both citizens and non-citizens of the United Arab Emirates. What were the responses you received in writing about both of these groups, given the exclusive citizenship laws in the Gulf?
RA: In this article, I wrote about how places like New York are often depicted positively as global, cosmopolitan cities with a lot of diversity. But the same people who boast about NYC’s diversity are dissatisfied when they find that in Dubai their taxi driver or waitress is not Emirati. I have pointed out this discrepancy in how people view global cities and which places are seen as legitimately global or cosmopolitan. However, some of the responses I received were that it was different: in Dubai a South Asian taxi driver or South East Asian waitress will never be citizens, while in the United States they could be—and therefore the diversity in the latter is more legitimate. While it is certainly true that citizenship laws in the Gulf are highly exclusive, the narrative that the United States has a more “real” diversity highlights the Orientalist nature of such discourses, as it disregards how exclusions exist in all these places, but manifest in different ways. It is much easier to gain citizenship in the United States than the United Arab Emirates, but it is also much more difficult to enter the United States than the United Arab Emirates—which is one of the reasons that there are so many South Asians, for example, there. And although immigrants can much more easily get citizenship in the United States, this does not mean that non-white Americans experience full belonging, that they are not being exploited, that they do not face racism or marginalization. This is not to say that we should not acknowledge these inequalities when they exist in the Gulf, but that we need to do so beyond exceptionalist narratives, by acknowledging that racism, inequality, and exclusions manifest in different ways in different places. By doing so, we can move away from the common narrative that creates a binary of places that are real (real cosmopolitan, real modern, real global) and then places that are fake (fake modern, fake cosmopolitan, fake global).
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pp. 1-4)
In a shopping center in an affluent part of Dubai, a group of old, retired Emirati men congregate daily in Starbucks. When I asked these men about places in Dubai where they felt a sense of community, they argued there was no real community anymore: it only existed in the old days, when everyone knew one another and everyone was Emirati—and these days were long gone. Likewise, popular and scholarly accounts depict similar narratives about the sense of alienation inhabitants of Gulf cities endure in cities dominated by neoliberal spectacles. Yet, a more complex picture emerges when one follows the everyday lives of these very individuals and learns the ways that they adapt and make meanings within (and not just behind or against) the glitzy and rapidly changing urban landscape they inhabit, which has created Dubai’s reputation as “the spectacular city.” It also highlights the need to understand people’s everyday lives holistically, beyond just interview data, as people’s experiences of the city do not always mirror how they speak about them.
These men, for instance, had appropriated the chain coffee shop (located in what would normally be considered a sanitized shopping center) in a “traditional” manner, almost like they would a majlis. They consumed little from it, as evidenced by the lone bottle of water sitting at the table, and brought their own food from home, such as a stainless-steel bowl of dates. One of them—who was the most vocal about his dislike of the city’s “superficiality” and its catering to tourists—often frequented the city’s fancy restaurants and five-star hotel lobbies, potent symbols of top-down and commerce-oriented spectacular development for which Dubai has become known. While this does not negate the sense of loss he and others experience, it draws attention to the reality that many inhabitants’ everyday lives—and the social meanings they make—do not only take place beyond the spectacular city but also within it. Even as these men considered the new Dubai to be less “authentic” than the city of their childhood, they were still making it their home. The example of their coffee shop outing ritual draws attention to ongoing processes of inhabiting spectacle pursued by adaptive agents to create meaningful everyday lives amid rapid development in the new Dubai, and not only beyond it.
Everyday Life in the Spectacular City is an urban ethnography that reveals how middle-class citizens and long-time residents of Dubai adaptively interact with the city’s spectacular spaces—such as its big shopping centers, gleaming new developments, and upscale coffee shops—to create meaningful social lives. I use the phrase “spectacular places” to refer not only to big developments but also to more mundane spaces, such as small coffee shops and malls. I do this because the latter still represent the spectacular and rapid scale of development in the city, which is often considered to be inauthentic, alienating, sanitized, too modern, and too foreign in popular and mainstream accounts. This book argues that these citizens and residents inhabit spectacle as adaptive agents: they adapt themselves to imposed structures while at times also making these same structures serve their own social needs, which evolve in tandem with the changing urban landscape of a now iconic metropolis defined by neoliberal patterns of modernization and globalization. Belying popular and scholarly portrayals of Dubai as inherently “inauthentic,” and therefore objectively alienating and disempowering, it presents adaptivity as a new framework for understanding how agency operates beyond the conceptual binary of resistance and capitulation within the increasingly twinned developments of illiberal society and neoliberal spectacle.
In response to Dubai’s dramatic development trajectory, it has become a common scholarly and popular pursuit to seek, implicitly or explicitly, to uncover the “real” city that lies beneath the veneer of the high-profile architecture and newly renovated, often privatized indoor and outdoor spaces of Dubai. This pursuit contrasts supposedly “authentic,” “local” spaces with “inauthentic,” “tourist” ones, which are often depicted as objectively alienating to local populations. While this vein of critique can voice sincere concerns about neoliberalism, exclusionary urbanism, and the losses that can accompany rapid changes, it is often mired in unexamined Orientalist attitudes and has little regard for the everyday realities of the many inhabitants of these layered landscapes. Indeed, while the new Dubai of today has been built by the state and globalized finance capital largely outside the oversight or control of Dubai’s citizens and residents, the significance of the city’s transformations is never fully determined by the intentions of its developers. This book, therefore, centers the ongoing adaptive work inhabitants do to transform Dubai’s spectacular places into personally important cultural sites, sites that house memories; provide places to gather, connect with one another, and “see and be seen”; and serve as public spaces where residents observe and negotiate social norms and various regimes of inclusion and exclusion. For adaptive agents, the spectacular city becomes a site of not only loss and marginalization but also belonging and community.
Inhabitants’ activity in forming meaningful connections with and within spectacular spaces grounds the book’s conceptual contribution to under-standing how contemporary subjects living in illiberal societies actively respond to their societies’ neoliberal developments. Dominant discourses conceptualize a limiting triptych of ways residents might relate to spectacular developments such as those in Dubai by (at least subtly) resisting the neoliberal agenda the developments represent; helplessly watching as the spectacle unfolds; or maybe enthusiastically accepting the new status quo. In this schema, agentic engagement with urban spaces is conflated with acts of defiance toward the spectacular city, which is not depicted as a “real” place. For instance, Yasser Elsheshtawy, considered one of the fore-most urbanism scholars writing on the Gulf, asserts that “in the midst of the spectacular city, between its cracks, another city emerges.” “The city’s ‘placelessness’ and temporariness is defied in many ways through small acts of resistance.” Such narratives privilege overt or subtle resistance to spectacle as meaningful, while positioning other experiences within the spectacular city as superficial, lacking in a deep engagement with urban space, or even the manifestation of false consciousness. This resistance-centered discourse prioritizes liberal conceptions of agency, overlooking the experiences of individuals deemed politically passive while simultaneously investing spectacular urban space with a level of power that can seem completely totalizing. Alternatively, my ethnography shows that middle-class citizens’ and residents’ attitudes toward the top-down developmental model do not fit into a triptych of supporters, oppressed, resistors. Instead, many are adaptive agents who inhabit and make meanings in a spectacular and illiberal city that shapes, but can also be shaped by, their desire to live a meaningful life and the practices they enact to achieve this goal.
Through its focus on contemporary Dubai and those who inhabit its spectacular spaces, this book offers a deeper look at an understudied middle- and upper-class population of people living everyday lives within an urban landscape that has recently undergone dramatic transformations. Because of the scale and rapidity of its developmental trajectory, and the spectacular spaces that have resulted, Dubai has frequently been portrayed as an exceptional place by both critics of the city and its boosters. Yet while some aspects of Dubai are unique to the city, its trajectory of spectacular development has echoes in other times and places within the Gulf region and across other parts of the world. Therefore, this research offers broader insights into how people create everyday life within top-down and commerce-oriented development through negotiating ongoing processes of loss and marginalization while also forging dynamic forms of belonging and community. Ultimately, adaptive agency offers a tool for understanding not only the actions of middle-class inhabitants in Dubai but also a more globalized phenomenon, for some of Dubai’s spectacles, this book argues, can be seen as unexceptional in today’s changing world.