Hearts,minds and money

The study of migrant lives in Persian Gulf cities became an academic growth area in the 2010s. This is part of the context to Transnational Geographies of the Heart. The growth reflected both the relative accessibility of those cities and migrant lives therein to researchers and the scale of migration, whereby, for example, around 80 per cent of Dubai’s and over 90 per cent of Doha’s population are migrants. The development of universities in the Persian Gulf, including several branch campuses of Western universities also enabled research. Most of the migrants working in the Gulf are from the global South, with South Asia providing the largest numbers, although as global cities, the Persian Gulf sultanates accommodate migrants from almost everywhere. Moreover, they were British protectorates in living memory (Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE to 1971 and Kuwait till 1961).

In these contexts, Katie Walsh’s book offers an original and important study. The originality rests partly on the book being one of only a handful of studies that examine the lives of foreigners who are citizens of a Western state in the Gulf. Although precise numbers are hard to come by, Walsh reports that there may be as many as 100,000 British citizens living in the UAE. Even if the number is only half that, this is a substantial population. Their lives and work have seldom been the subject of academic scrutiny. The book’s focus on intimate subjectivities is another source of originality. As Walsh explains in the introduction, she set out to research senses of home and belonging among British diaspora in Dubai, but this shifted to her focus on interpersonal relationships:

Intimacy, highlighting personal relationships and the array of closer connections through which British migrants negotiate belonging in everyday life, turned out to dominate other people’s telling of life in Dubai and my listening. (pp. 3–4)

Walsh locates her book in several cross-cutting literatures. The first is on British migration. There are over five million UK citizens living outside the UK, though how many of these are dual citizens is unclear. A second literature that Walsh draws on is postcolonialism, from studies of the colonial origins of the idea of an expatriate, though to wider writing on postcolonial cities. Other literatures include those on friendship, heteronormativity and whiteness. While identified as ethnographic, and rich in observations, the mode of ethnography developed in the book rests centrally on interviews. These yield a very readable case study, offered as a case study of and plea for:

geographers to take intimate subjectivities more seriously in conceptualising the spatialities of globalisation and migration. Focusing on our intimate lives does not involve a turn away from global processes. (p. 154)

It is worth reflecting on the wider literature on migrant lives in Gulf cities in the light of Walsh’s book. Much of that literature focuses on labour and places of residence in which intimate subjectivities are seldom foregrounded. Why is that? I suspect that the racialized and class positions of researchers and interlocuters are key. Walsh is closer to her research subjects in race/class terms than most researchers are to the migrants from South Asia. In related terms, the taboos around discussing these themes and the fact that families are usually not present in the Gulf for lower-waged migrants makes the issues harder to foreground. Such work as there has been on this theme has tended to focus on Filipina workers – whose lives and labours have also been relatively accessible to some (usually women) ethnographers.

Transnational Geographies of the Heart signals and invites further work. The interlocuters whose lives inform the book are mostly white. But a fifth of British citizens do not identify as white. What kinds of subject positions emerge among these British and how do they relate to whiteness and other axes of identity, such as Englishness and being an ‘expat’? Around 1 in 20 Britons is a Muslim. How too does that enter the picture? The book is overwhelmingly secular in focus. How does faith figure? And how do the transnational lives, education and work articulate with capital and class more widely in the UK? Such questions connect with literatures on inequality and intergenerational class transfers of wealth and opportunity. The Gulf, and Arabia more widely have long been sites where capital for property, private schooling and private medical care in the UK is generated. What are the scales, movements and consequences of this money? The study of migrant remittances and their impacts on places of origin have been charted in the case of India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Less is known about this in the case of the UK. Dubai has many wealth management firms whose primary customer base is among British citizens in the UAE. How do they relate to the intimate geographies that are Walsh’s focus? I pose such questions not as criticism of Transnational Geographies of the Heart, but as indications of how the book connects with and raises other research agendas. It will stimulate further work on these and related themes in Gulf cities. It offers a template too and will become an essential reference point for other studies of home, migration, subjectivity, ‘race’ and class.