Dubai Contexts and Contestations
Dubai Contexts and Contestations
The introduction discusses the politics of urbanity surrounding Dubai and its transition from a traditionalist state to a rapidly urbanizing global city operating under neoliberalist ideologies. Studies into the city have often eschewed the contexts of empire and capital in favor of the traditional—obscuring the city’s complexities as a result. Dubai (and the Arab Gulf in general) had previously resisted reforms in anticolonial fervor, although in recent years modernity has taken hold of the region, ushering in a state of “orientalism in reverse” for a city once considered to be suspended in time and mysteriously Orient. Dubai is a dynamic, rapidly modernizing global city subject to reform projects—most notably from the “starchitects”—representing the allure of progress in spatial dimensions. Yet the city also struggles with the old questions of modernity and independence within a new, rising hegemony in the postcolonial state.
Keywords: Dubai, urbanity, Arab Gulf, starchitects, hegemony, global city, orientalism in reverse, modernity
Minnesota Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
