Inter-Asian Solidarities and the Island of Happiness

• In Event: Media, Activism and the New Political: Inter-Asian Perspectives

Abstract

This paper examines the dilemmas and possibilities of mediated solidarity between two seemingly distant communities: South Asian migrants who make up the largest number of migrant workers building the Guggenheim, Louvre and NYU campus on Saadiyat (Happiness) Island, a “luxury destination” 500 meters off the coast of Abu Dhabi, and a transnational coalition of artists, students and activists mobilized around labor rights and standards. The paper is organized around three inter-related questions: How have the Arab Uprisings of 2011 changed the regulatory regimes of migrant labor in the Gulf States?; What role have transnational activists played since 2011 and how have their attempts at negotiating solidarity been mediated?; Finally, how are the politics of race, ethnicity and class negotiated by the migrant workers themselves both in Abu Dhabi and in the circuits of recruitment and return to South Asia? I draw from a wide range of news media, film and documentary, social media as well as interviews and on-going participant observation.

Author

• Paula U. Chakravartty, New York U