Includes bibliographical references (p. [221]-234) and index.

Introduction -- Exceptions and exceptionality in Dubai -- Capitalism run amok? why the "Dubai story" is incomplete -- The "rentier" state: oil, development, and migration -- Multiple logics of governance -- Citizenship and its exceptions -- Exception and its exceptions: centering Agamben and Dubai in citizenship studies -- Substantive and latitudinal citizenship within Dubai's Indian diaspora -- Are Indians in Dubai diasporic? -- Waves of indianness: taking and making the nation overseas -- Logics of belonging and citizenship in diaspora studies -- A tale of two creeks: cosmopolitan productions and cosmopolitan -- Erasures in contemporary Dubai -- New Dubai and the production of global futures -- Selling Arabia: producing differentiated foreign subjects -- Making purified pasts: heritage, citizenship, and national identity -- The making of tradition -- An Indian city? diasporic subjectivity and urban citizenship in old Dubai -- Liminal diaspora, liminal nation -- India extended: geographies of similarity and difference -- Neither "expat" nor "laborer" -- Diasporic identifications and ambivalences -- Geographies of belonging and exclusion -- Between global city and golden frontier: Indian businessmen -- Unofficial citizenship, and shifting forms of belonging? -- We built this country? -- Freedom, cosmopolitanism, and re-export: Indian ocean networks -- The creek frontier: mercantilism, masculinity, and nostalgia -- Maneuvering neoliberalisms: monopolies of "freedom" in Dubai's gold industry -- Non-citizen kafeels -- Exceeding the economic: new modalities of belonging among middle-class Dubai Indians --Dubai is like a bus, an air-conditioned bus: economic migration and middle-class ideology -- Racism and the failure of the free market -- Race and the making of the middle class -- Consumer citizenship, choice, and claims to the city -- Becoming Indian in Dubai: parochialisms and globalisms in privatized education -- DBCD: Dubai-born confused desi -- Producing parochialisms through education -- -- Globalized higher education in the Gulf -- Dissonance, discrimination, and diasporic subjectification -- Reassessing Gulf studies: citizenship, democracy, and the political -- Rethinking the political -- De-provincializing democracy -- Making diasporic futures.