CMENAS Colloquium Series. The Storied Gulf: Storytelling, Migration, and Masculinities

The injustices of the Gulf visa sponsorship system and the harsh aspects of migrant life there are well documented. And yet, the heavy influx of migrant labor from particular regions in South Asia to the Gulf states remains unabated. This leads to the question: If things are so bad, then why do migrants keep coming? Some scholars have answered this question by putting forth an argument that migrants paint a rosy picture of Gulf life in their home cities, and, in so doing, funnel their compatriots into exploitative labor arrangements abroad. Do migrants not tell stories of hardship in home cities? If they do, why do those stories not dissuade aspiring migrants? I contend that centering prospective emigrant as discerning listeners helps us understand both the nuanced motivations for migration and why returnees tell the kinds of stories they do. I attend to the circulatory contexts of migrants’ Gulf stories in a small city in Pakistan, and the gendered repertoire of characterological figures through which listeners evaluate them. Decades of circulation of men from this Pakistani city to the Gulf and back has produced going through the storied trials of Gulf life as a rite of passage to the status of adult manhood and masculine respectability. The storytelling about Gulf life in Pakistan is thereby structured by a masculinist discourse with the following idea at its core: since Gulf work is harsh, only hard men are suited for it. This Gulf gauntlet subsumes stories of hardship within its own lore. The harder the rite, the higher mettled the passenger.

Salman Adil Hussain is a historical anthropologist of Indian Ocean mobilities, and South Asian diasporas. His research specializations include borders and belonging, masculinity, transnational labor, migrant racialization, autoethnography, storytelling, humor, and kinship. His dissertation, Migrants at Home: Gulf Migrations, Masculinities, and the Politics of Return in Pakistan, is the first monograph on Pakistani migrations to the Gulf in the past 30 years. It studies how masculinity structures key processes of migrations: migration brokerage, sociality, self-fashioning, and return mobilities. His next project explores the racialization and surveillance of migrants—South Asians in the Gulf and U.S. Muslims—in a comparative framework.

RSVP: https://myumi.ch/w9QNx

Co-sponsor: GISC


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Email: -- warsansa@umich.edu