“The Sheikh of Araby Rides a Cadillac”: Popular geoeconomic imaginations,positional anxiety and nouveau riche territories

In 20th century media coverage of the Arab States of the Persian Gulf, reporters devoted an inordinately large amount of space to describing (often disapprovingly) how the people of that region utilized Cadillacs. Having been confronted with this puzzle in the archive (i.e. what work was being done by so frequently associating these territories with Cadillacs?), this paper argues that in popular imaginations, change in the world economy—especially the rise of “nouveau riche territories”—is often understood in terms of personified and objectified dramas of right/wrong, which perform the work of distinction. By drawing on an analysis of newspaper and magazine articles and bringing together consumption, psychoanalytic, and post-colonial literatures, this article makes two contributions to understanding how positional anxieties function transnationally: (1) by arguing that places like the Gulf States can have impacts on geoeconomic imaginations that far outpace their size, because these states and their people are seen to break the constellation of practices associated with having obtained the “good life”, thus creating a boundary between them and “normalcy”; and, (2) by demonstrating that stories of nouveau riche consumption gain force through interaction with psychically charged objects like Cadillacs, through a process called “extimacy”.