Gilles Deleuze argues that modern political cinema should be based on the premise that “the people no longer exist, or not yet . . . the people are missing” (*Cinema 2* 216). He claims that in the “third world” and within minority cultures, writers, artists, or film-makers are in a position, “in relation to their nation and their personal situation in that nation, to say: the people are what is missing” (217). For Deleuze, this absence is no cause for sorrow but, rather, an opportunity for invention and experimentation: “[T]he missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettos, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute” (217). 1991 is the year the Palestinian community in Kuwait went missing. The causes and circumstances of this disappearance are well documented (Amnesty International, *Five Years of Impunity*, 1996; Lesch, “Palestinians in Kuwait” 1991; Lesch, “No Refuge for Refugees,” 2005; Ghabra, “Palestinians and Kuwaitis,” 1997; Middle East Watch, *Victory Turned Sour*, 1991). But eighteen years on, some of the more subtle consequences of this disappearance have yet to be addressed. While the devastating ramifications of these events on the marginalized and vulnerable Palestinians in Kuwait are easy enough to identify, the effects of this disappearance on Kuwait and its citizens are generally not recognized as worthy of investigation. Notwithstanding Deleuze’s upbeat take on minorities, the approximately 45,000 Palestinians left in Kuwait today (down from 380,000 in 1990) have maintained a low profile. Given the precarious condition of their legal, sociopolitical, and economic status in Kuwait, it’s no wonder. On the flip side, Kuwaitis themselves tend to remain silent regarding the “overlapping yet irreconcilable experiences” of living with and without Palestinians in Kuwait (Said, *Humanism* 143). My paper (informed by Deleuze, Said, and Zizek) reads this silence as a symptom of the greater tendency to brush aside singular histories, cultures, and experiences in the name of the dominant, monovocal narrative of the Islamo-Kuwaiti nation. I argue that the casual disregard of such singularities as well as the highly partisan manipulation of national/historical memory keep Kuwait at a crippling impasse. A move toward the figuration of a less monolithic, less limited community-to-come necessitates remembering those missing singularities, the missing Palestinians not least of all.

Since the advent of oil, Kuwait has undergone significant transformations through a process of urban development that constantly replaces old with new. The first cycle of oil urbanization (1950s-70s) involved razing most of the pre-oil town to make way for a new “modern” city. Following two decades of relative inactivity, a second cycle of urbanization started in 2003 and has initiated the demolition of that same early-oil urban landscape to make way for something newer. The “destruction of past ways of living and being in the world” for the sake of progress is not unique to the oil modernizing Gulf but arguably does occur more widely and rapidly in the cities of this region (Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts 2). In Kuwait especially, the cyclical and systemic erasure and reconstruction of the built environment makes it seem more like an “etch-a-sketch,” constantly shaking off the old to create the new, than an urban palimpsest with readable traces of the old lying beneath the new. However, along with the demolition and urban development of the last five years, an “overlapping yet irreconcilable experience” has emerged (Edward Said, Humanism 143). Kuwait has also recently seen a flurry of state-sponsored “historical” activity: a turn to what Huyssen calls a “culture of memory” (15). A few extant and dilapidated pre-oil buildings have been restored, museums have opened within old structures, and a new replica “heritage village” of the pre-oil town is currently under construction. What has triggered this turn to memory in a country that has been and continues to be built on a process of forgetting? Is the timing coincidental or are the two processes intrinsically linked? My paper explores these questions through an analysis of “the mechanisms and tropes of historical trauma and national memory practices” (Huyssen 16). One aim is to demonstrate how the current invoking of memory culture in Kuwait is ultimately a project of state legitimacy linked to methods of political myth making and the invention of tradition. I also suggest that the overlapping yet irreconcilable experiences of heritage and destructive development in Kuwait can be explained in no small part by the lure of global consumerism. My study is based on the use of official state records, newspaper articles, oral testimonies, and on visual explorations of relevant sites in Kuwait.

Since independence, Kuwait has been moving towards a social model of liberal democracy. However, there exist contradictions between Kuwait’s democratic aspirations and, first, its constitution, which restricts the rights of women, children, and immigrants; second, its definition of citizenship, which discriminates on the basis of arbitrary criteria; and, third, the widespread conservative interpretations of Islamic shari‘a, which tend further to disenfranchise women and children and to curtail civil liberties more generally. Successive governments have recognized the role of education and youth in the democratic process. Kuwait’s membership in the UN, UNESCO, and as signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child mark this awareness. However, these pledges are “irreconcilable” with the country’s school system and curriculum (Edward Said, Humanism 143). The segregated, Kuwaiti children-only school system is discriminatory by design, and the curricular emphasis on religion and nationalism tends not to promote any critical thinking. Substandard school buildings and classrooms are not designed to facilitate student-centered activities. In short, Kuwait’s educational system is in direct conflict with its democratic aspirations. I suggest that it is only by anchoring Kuwait’s educational system in a discourse and practice of human rights that a truly cosmopolitan citizenry equipped to advance democracy can emerge (Audrey Osler and Hugh Starkey, Changing Citizenship). The secular discourse of human rights, as Lynn Davies argues, makes possible the types of discussions religious discourse forecloses in advance (Educating Against Extremism 159). As a “universal value system” separate from religious belief, human rights discourse may open a more flexible social and political space to educate on rights, responsibilities, ethics, and tolerance—all exigent concerns in an increasingly multicultural society in a globalized world (Davies 159). My paper addresses whether such a value model can overlap both with Kuwait’s constitution and its restrictive curriculum within its undemocratic school system. Informed by the case study methodology of Robert Yin, I analyze the unique case of Jumana Bint Abi Talib Secondary School—a member of UNESCO’s Associated Schools Project Network and the only Kuwaiti government school to win an international award in human rights and citizenship education. Utilizing UNESCO ideals, ASPnet learning themes, and the powerful rhetoric of the UN and international human rights laws, this school has, despite many irreconcilable knots, “go[ne] forth to try anyway” (Said 143). Its success generates optimism and offers a viable model for change in Kuwait’s system of education.

Domestic workers from East Africa, and South and South East Asia are a ubiquitous and integral part of Kuwait. They comprise one-sixth of the total population and are employed in more than 90% of households. Whether it be cooking, cleaning or caring for children and the elderly, their work is crucial to Kuwait’s social reproduction. Over the past decade, it is estimated that tens of thousands of these women have taken shehadeh, the Islamic testament of faith. A widespread social phenomenon, these conversions have generated a great deal of debate in Kuwait and in domestic workers’ places of origin. These debates center on one question: why are these women adopting Islamic precepts and practices? Drawing on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kuwait, and 2 months of research in Nepal, my paper maps out two explanations given for domestic workers newfound pieties. One explanation, circulating among Kuwait’s foreign resident population, members of Kuwait’s liberal movement, local and international human rights organizations, labour agencies, foreign embassies and domestic workers’ families and communities of origin, focuses on the political-economic factors and asymmetrical power relations leading to domestic workers’ ‘conversion to Islam’. The other explanation, espoused by members of Kuwait’s myriad Islamic reform and da’wa groups, focuses on the ethical processes through which these women ‘become Muslim’. Both explanations are predicated on incommensurable forms of reasoning that often lead people to misapprehend or speak past one another when addressing the issue of domestic workers’ pieties. In tracing these areas of dissonance, my paper discusses the ways in which these explanations index and instantiate two competing political discourses in Kuwait—those of liberal secularist and Islamic reformers. My paper explores these issues by tracing out several of my interlocutors’ experiences, and by tracing out how others, including their employers, family members, and people concerned with Kuwait’s domestic work sector, understand and talk about domestic workers’ newfound practice of Islam. In so doing, my paper underscores the importance of the household as an integral site in and through which forms of social belonging and political practice are being reconfigured and remapped in our increasingly integrated world.