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Subalterns and the city: Dubai as cross-cultural caravanserai in City of Life and Pinky Memsaab

ABSTRACT Within the archetypal vision of Dubai as ostentatious oil-rich global megacity, this essay’s alternative scoping sees a city of interconnected spatio-cultural archipelagos. In these crisscrossing synapses, marginal outsiders can occupy potentially disruptive positions within mainstream power matrices and exclusionary corridors of capitalism. Interrogating a commonly accepted paradigm of subaltern urbanism, I argue that the invariable typecasting of subaltern spaces and association of subaltern demographics with the spatial strictures of urban slums, shanty towns, ghettoes and favelas retrenches the imaginary of the subaltern as excluded abject destined to dwell apart and dislocated from the epicentre of legitimised social, cultural, economic and political activity. Instead, the subaltern presence within mainstream urban ecosystems of power concentration and capital dominance constitutes a chance for dispossessed outsiders to disrupt the legitimised linearity of privileged stakeholders’ entitlement and always-already assumed ‘right to the city‘. I will appraise two films where Dubai is positioned as a site for subaltern Asian disruptors acting as both silent and voluble agents from within elite social structures. British-Emirati director Ali F. Mostafa’s City of Life(2009) and Pakistani filmmaker Shazia Ali Khan’s Pinky Memsaab (2018) harness Dubai as a cosmopolitan canvas where inter-Asian informal and formal modes of lived experience intertwine with heterotopic transglobal textures of the city’s capital-dominated relational grid. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates how subaltern South Asian subjects in exilic global hubs such as Dubai carry potentiality of acting as internal agents, working within capitalism’s mainstream power structures to perform informality as a mode of organic and endogenous resistance.