Everyday Life in the Spectacular City is a groundbreaking urban ethnography that reveals how middle-class citizens and longtime residents of Dubai interact with the city's so-called superficial spaces to create meaningful social lives. Rana AlMutawa shows that inhabitants adapt themselves to top-down development projects, from big malls to megaprojects. These structures serve residents' evolving social needs, transforming Dubai's spectacular spaces into personally important cultural sites. These practices are significant because they expand our understanding of agency as not only subversive but also adaptive. Through extensive fieldwork, AlMutawa, herself an Emirati native to Dubai, finds a more nuanced story of belonging. This story does not seek to uncover the "real" city that lies beneath the veneer of the spectacle, but rather to demonstrate that social meanings and forms of belonging take place within the spectacle itself. By offering an alternative to the discourse of authenticity and elucidating the dynamics of ambivalent belonging, AlMutawa belies stereotypes that portray Dubai's developments as alienating and inherently disempowering. Everyday Life in the Spectacular City speaks beyond the Middle East to a globalized phenomenon, for Dubai's spectacles are unexceptional in today's changing world.
Rana AlMutawa is Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi.
"This exceptionally engaging book offers a uniquely compelling account of the contemporary Orientalism inherent in the Western liberal gaze on cities like Dubai. It is a must-read for anyone interested in everyday life and political subjectivity in the Global South."—Sneha Krishnan, Associate Professor in Human Geography, University of Oxford
"Everyday Life in the Spectacular City is a timely and excellent intervention in Gulf studies. Focusing on Dubai, it sets out to show how 'spectacular' spaces are inhabited, upsetting binaries of authentic versus fake spaces, belonging versus marginalization, and resistance versus capitulation."—Noora A. Lori, author of Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf
"This book does the very important, useful work of demystifying Dubai—with relevance for its regional neighbors—and presenting it as a real, lived place that is neither utopian nor dystopian but an actual topos of everyday excitements, disappointments, adjustments, and improvisations."—Ryan Centner, Associate Professor of Human Geography and Urban Studies, London School of Economics
"A refreshing, necessary, corrective lens for viewing contemporary Dubai. While other observers wield the city as their ideological lodestone, Rana AlMutawa reveals contours of a real Dubai with all its complexity. A city notorious for constant transformation, we learn, undergoes change in the hands of people making a home out of it."—Todd Reisz, author of Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai
"Accounts of Dubai are almost never written by Emiratis themselves, let alone people like AlMutawa who actually grew up there and know what it is like to call the place home."—Natalie Koch, author of Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia
294 pp.6 x 9Illus: 17 b/w figures
9780520395060$29.95|£25.00Paper
Jan 2024