This panel aims to bring visibility to the cultural productions of narratives from one of the largest living diaspora of contemporary times—migrants in the Arabian Gulf States currently estimated to be around 23 million. Since the 'discovery' of oil in the 1960s, the Gulf States of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (hereafter referred to as Gulf) have employed a large expatriate labor force that forms the crux of its workforce not only in the hydrocarbon industry, but also by extension, in its medical, banking, transportation, hospitality, and educational facilities. The developments of these service and rentier industries have further resulted in large-scale recruitment of ‘guest-workers.’ Recent statistics tell us that more than half the total population of the Gulf are such expatriates that continue to leave a significant mark on Gulf’s everyday socio-cultural, physical, and vernacular landscapes. However, existing academic scholarship on these economic migrants has focused mainly on labor exploitation of a peculiar contract-based migratory practice of the Gulf (kafala) by contextualizing it in sociological, legal, economic, and policy discourses. Sadly, the human affects of Gulf migration and the aspirational value of literature in establishing progress in such migratory practices remain scantily examined. This proposed panel attempts to intervene and analyze that lacuna.

The panel, comprised of established scholars from different parts of the world—Sharjah to Dartmouth to Doha, investigates how literary works that interpret migration to the Gulf register their interpretational power and creative potential in transforming human relations by imaginatively portraying and humanizing migratory practices. For instance, Dr. Meeking’s paper provides a reassessment of a constructed Gulf national identity that is often shaped by adaptations to and against the migrant ‘other.’ Using his experiences in teaching memoirs in Doha, he studies how the foreigner brings the citizenry together as a distinctly ‘national’ community and contributes to shaping its identity. Meanwhile, Dr. Arora’s presentation focuses on short stories by South and Southeast Asian women writers such as Tahmima Anam, Hasanthika Sirisena, and Mia Alvar to find ways that add to the knowledge about and understanding of globalization’s discourses in the Gulf context. Her paper asserts that these writers emphasize the material conditions and challenges of migrants’ lives, particularly from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, to highlight the exploitation of unregulated and informal labor within profit-driven market globalism, all the while not depicting the workers as victims. Through emphasizing the workers’ subjectivity and interiority, the stories invite readers to perform an act of imaginative empathy with them, powerfully emphasizing the connection of literature to social justice. This is followed by Dr. LaDuke’s presentation that examines Gulf migration and its complex workings in the domestic spheres in two award-winning novels—Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies (set in Oman) and Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (largely set in Kuwait) to highlight the pressures faced by citizens torn between tradition and change in a post-oil discovery society. Despite the disparate settings and characters of these two novels, a common theme emerges—a fundamental ambiguity in the personal dynamics within domestic spaces that arise from the native employers’ emotional reliance upon and even envy of their migrant-employees, and, at the same time, their resentment of the intimate knowledge their workers gain of them and their inability or lack of desire to truly know their employees. The concluding presentation by Dr. Agasi discusses how migration to the Gulf is figured in the Arabic literary imagination. One of the texts she unpacks is the Kuwaiti writer Saud Alsanousi’s award-winning novel, The Bamboo Stalk. Her paper asserts an aspiring and affective aspect of literary production in the Gulf—here is a writer of Kuwaiti origin, boldly attempting a social critique of his own country, notorious for its human rights violations, censorship laws, and lack of freedom of the press. That the text is published and circulated widely in Kuwait (even made into a TV series) is in itself proof of the value literature has in accessing closed communities such as this one in the Gulf.

Thus, the four unique papers featured in the panel will help intervene in contemporary Gulf migration studies by examining how literary narratives articulate aspirational values through the empathetic act of interpretation by transforming the material elements of known and shared migratory practices into an instructive aesthetic experience. Each presentation will last for 12-13 minutes, reserving time for the mandatory 15-minute unstructured discussion at the end.