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

Indian communities have existed in the Gulf emirate of Dubai for more than a century. Since the 1970s, workers from South Asia have flooded into the emirate, enabling Dubai's huge construction boom. They now comprise its largest noncitizen population. Though many migrant families are middle-class and second-, third-, or even fourth-generation residents, Indians cannot become legal citizens of the United Arab Emirates. Instead, they are all classified as temporary guest workers. In Impossible Citizens, Neha Vora draws on her ethnographic research in Dubai's Indian-dominated downtown to explore how Indians live suspended in a state of permanent temporariness. While their legal status defines them as perpetual outsiders, Indians are integral to the Emirati nation-state and its economy. At the same time, Indians - even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate - disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home. Vora shows how these multiple and conflicting logics of citizenship and belonging contribute to new understandings of contemporary citizenship, migration, and national identity, ones that differ from liberal democratic models and that highlight how Indians, rather than Emiratis, are the quintessential - yet impossible .