Abstract
This paper examines the ways in which multiple border-crossings and their attendant anxieties inform understandings of citizenship and belonging among a small group of second-generation middle-class Indian migrants from Oman. Based on interviews conducted between November 2013 and January 2014, it aims to engage with a growing body of scholarship on the transnational lives of South Asian migrants in the Arabian Peninsula. In recent years, several scholars have examined unofficial discourses and practices of citizenship among Indian migrants within the Gulf states (Vora 2013; Gardner 2010); however, much remains to be done on the complex ways in which these non-citizens simultaneously contend with the discourses and structures of the states to which they can lay juridico-legal claims as citizens. As Aihwa Ong (1999) has argued, nation-states have indeed responded creatively and effectively to transnational flows of human capital, shaping and being shaped by the strategies of their ‘flexible’ citizens.
Drawing on Ong’s thesis, this study will explore the ways in which sending states continue to interpellate citizen-subjects outside their political boundaries through passports and categories of citizenship (such as the ones examined herein). In particular, I will look at the deployment of the socio-legal categories of the “expatriate” and the “NRI” (Non-resident Indian) by the Omani and Indian states respectively to manage a particular class of overseas citizens. These classed identities elicit specific performances, narratives, affirmations, and disavowals from my interlocutors in specific national contexts as they travel along multifocal itineraries. I will argue that the transmigrant subjectivities of my interlocutors are formed and reformed at the intersection of these gradations of citizenship/non-citizenship; in other words, it is the simultaneity of their operations that produces migrant subjects. The process of subject formation here involves a tension between being 'always-already interpellated' (in Althusser's formulation) by multiple state logics and contesting these very logics.
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