Summary

Migrants in the Arab Gulf states have, since the mid-2000s, become the subject of increasing research attempting to understand how their lives are shaped by migration policies that systematically marginalize them and, in turn, how their everyday practices allow them to navigate structures of legal and social marginalization and assert their agency and presence beyond their status as temporary economic actors. Less attention has been paid to the cultural implications of decades of Gulf migration and the role of literary and cultural productions in narrating migrant stories. The success of Malayalam-, Arabic- and English-language novels, like Benyamin’s Aatujeevitham (2008; Goat Days, 2012), Ḥajjī Jābir’s (Haji Jaber’s) Samrāwīt (2012), Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī’s Sāq al-Bāmbū (2012; Saud Alsanousi’s The Bamboo Stalk, 2015), and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017), respectively, has revealed the need for a cultural space for addressing issues of labor exploitation, exclusion, citizenship, identity, and belonging in the unequal and multicultural societies of the Gulf. The scarcity of literary writings on and by migrants can itself be attributed to the definitive role of structural exclusion and socioeconomic divisions between citizens and noncitizens in hindering the creation of such a cultural space. At the same time, a lack of attention to the cultural effects of migration in Gulf spaces and the home countries of migrants is a symptom of the marginality of global South migrations and the centrality of the South–North axis in literary approaches to migration narratives. The thematic and formal features of literary writings on Gulf migration speak to world migration literature, but they are a product of the particular political, economic, and social realities that have from the 1970s onward characterized the transient lives of migrants in the region from different national groups and socioeconomic backgrounds. Herein lies the value of Gulf migration literatures as cultural responses to such realities, as imaginative depictions of everyday affects and embodied individual experiences that are often unacknowledged both in official national narratives on migration in the home and host country and in macroscopic scholarly understandings of these realities.