This paper aims, first, to explore the shortcomings that have derived from ignoring race in Gulf studies, and, second, to suggest that centering the region in race and ethnic studies, which tend to favor American exceptionalist and Atlantic Ocean framings, has the potential to deepen our understanding of global race hierarchies, the transnational historical intimacies through which they emerge, and their contemporary localizations. Our argument is based on our ethnographic research with various inhabitants of three cities of the Arabian Peninsula, and on readings in the fields of Gulf studies and race and ethnic studies. We explore how the lack of a racial analysis prevents scholars from effectively interrogating past and present effects of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery in the Peninsula. Race is also critical to understanding the ways that labor stratification and capitalist accumulation in the region are legitimized through essentialized ideas of “national" difference. Race is a technology that reifies the national fantasy of a pure Arab Gulf citizen and is used by state actors and everyday residents to reproduce stereotypes about the region’s inhabitants. And racist presumptions naturalize the status of white and Western researchers as objective outsiders. Yet, scholarship produced in the last decade also reveals the potential of Arabian Peninsula studies to make a valuable contribution to the field of race and ethnic studies. We suggest that the region is central to the study of contemporary racial capitalism, and especially to understanding how transnational job markets transform nationalities into racial categories. The racialization of nationalities through differential value placed on human labor intersects with class, gender, and sexuality/biopolitical regimes. As Gulf societies have the highest rates of immigration in the world, they are also globally relevant places to study the rapid circulation and sedimentation of racial categories. People are constantly moving in and out of Gulf cities, bringing with them ideas about difference and belonging that not only impact localized categories but also change immigrant perceptions which they then bring back to their home communities, and which circulate globally.

This paper poses what seems like an answerable and descriptive question about a group’s characteristics: are Zanzibaris “Arabs” who count as “people of the Gulf”? We contend that this designation, like other racial identifiers, is not exclusively (or arguably even primarily) determined by the characteristics of the group in question. In other words, “Arab” and “people of the Gulf” are not simply categorical designations of group membership that are determined by a shared attribute such as language, religion, customs, territory, ethnicity, or nationality. Instead,“Arab” represents a claim to authenticity–one that has to be recognized by the political entities that have successfully monopolized the authority over a territory and its inhabitants. As state formation in the Gulf is consolidated in the late Twentieth century, ethnic minorities in the Arab side of the Persian Gulf are increasingly pressured to perform and prove their authenticity as Arabs in order to fit into the racial hierarchy that is crystalized and codified by new citizenship regimes. Our paper draws upon a corpus of documents that address the status of Zanzibaris in the UAE, including: the British Records of the Emirates (BRE), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) records, and an archive from the Dubai Ruler’s Court (diwan) about displaced persons arriving in the Dubai ports from 1967 to 2013. Our reading of the records is guided by our engagement in legal advocacy for stateless populations in the UAE. Through our analysis of these materials, we tie ethnic identifications to political allegiances and the shifting balance of power that accompanies state formation in the UAE. Instead of providing an answer to whether Zanzibaris are “Arabs,” we foreground the domestic and international politics that undergird racial hierarchies in the region. We show how racialized perceptions of competing political elites and external actors (empires and foreign states) influence the status of groups, as well as how international organizations, such as UNHCR, have wielded the language of racial similarity to advance their humanitarian agenda. We also highlight the role of the Zanzibar Association in Dubai, building upon studies that focus on the meso-level of analysis to show how civil society organizations act as brokers with the state, allowing immigrants to navigate racial hierarchies and make citizenship claims and political demands.

This paper explores how young Emiratis articulate nation-ness in relation to ethnic heterogeneity and ancestral migration histories among their national population. Where indigenous and national population of the Emirates is racialized as Arab, I illustrate how the notion of Arabness is deployed by young Emiratis both in a flexible and essential manner to legitimise their understanding of nation-ness. The paper presents findings from a qualitative study conducted in Dubai with young Emiratis. Some of the participants' families migrated from various parts of the Indian Ocean, Baluchistan, Southern Persia, Arabian Peninsula and East Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth century and received Emirati nationality and/or passports. In understanding conceptions of Arabness, I follow the argument that kinship is a selective and social process of performing the ‘relations that matter’ (Nash, 2005). While this implies performances of kinship are flexible to a certain degree, they are also often limited by a racially exclusive understanding of national communities. I demonstrate this argument first by revealing the contingent inclusion of individuals to Arabness on the basis of their time of arrival to Dubai and ‘having the right papers’. The possession of jinsiya (nationality) is perceived as a testament of ‘adequate’ length of residence in the national territory, thus marking holders as deserving and loyal citizens, as well as rendering their ‘lack of Arab origin’ and/or origins outside the Arabian Peninsula unimportant. Second, I illustrate how this flexibility is constrained by the stratified citizenship system in the UAE, where some Emiratis only hold passports (jawaz) and others have been waiting to receive their passports. Regardless of their temporal rootedness to Dubai, Emiratis lacking jinsiya are typically considered as lacking historical connections to the UAE, thus considered as not being ‘real Emiratis’. While this implies the most legitimate form of Emiratiness is reserved for those holding formal state citizenship, the paper also illustrates how boundaries are shaped informally, where even among jinsiya holders ‘Arab purity’ informs the most authentic form of Emiratiness. By attending to the complexities of the category of Arabness, this paper underlines the deep connection between ideas of race and nation, both of which, like kinship, rely on the notions of sameness and difference and their reconfiguration in response to shifting socio-economic and political circumstances.

According to earliest recorded accounts, the community of Black Yemenis known as the Muhamasheen, or the “marginalized,” have resided in Yemen since the sixth century. Yet, their position on the margins of Yemeni social landscape and their racialization as permanent outsiders challenges understanding of race and racialization in the Arabian Peninsula. Unlike other Black and non-Arab migrants to the Gulf, the Muhamasheen’s presence in Yemen is not a consequence of contemporary labor migration. Indeed, Muhamasheen identify as Indigenous Arab Yemenis. This historic presence disrupts our understanding of territory and identity. This paper explores the racialization of the Muhamasheen as permanent outsiders in a territory in which they have resided for centuries. It further demonstrates how non-Black Yemenis deployed imagined genealogies in this racialization process. The Muhamasheen experience contributes to a global history of race and reveals the gradations of Blackness (and the consequential gradations of anti-Blackness) that operate in the Gulf. Moving Yemen from the margins of Arabian Peninsula studies to its center allows for new ways to interrogate race and racialization in the region. This is because Yemen’s significant and historical links to East Africa and the broader Indian Ocean World allows us to reconceptualize the Gulf as spatially belonging to the same world as East Africa and South Asia. In this way, Yemen, and the Indigenous Black Muhamasheen in particular, help reveal a legacy of Blackness that does not only migrate to the Middle East but is woven into the very social histories of the region.

In recent years, controversies over the politics of knowledge production in Qatar have unsettled how U.S. branch campuses reinforce racialized hierarchies that uphold the supremacy of white Anglo-American expertise in the Gulf. These protests (occurring both physically and virtually) have often focused on overt moments when faculty, administrators, and staff are explicitly racist towards students and communities across Qatar. In this paper, I engage with and build on these analyses of how racism operates in and through the US university in the Gulf. Turning to Texas A&M University at Qatar, an engineering branch campus established in 2003, I argue that legal and administrative mechanisms deployed by the institution maintain and reproduce racialized labor hierarchies of engineering labor and expertise. The educational project of producing engineers in Qatar is uniquely embedded in global capitalism, particularly as a profession closely tied to the development of oil and gas, the military and logistics spaces across the Gulf. In the first part of the paper, I examine how US policy, particularly the National Defense Authorization Act and Protect our Universities Act, impacts research at the branch campus and further excludes people based on nationality in the Gulf, specifically researchers holding citizenship and residency status in Russia, Iran, and China. This policy, while framed through the lens of US national security, reinforces various racialized hierarchies of engineering expertise inside and outside the branch campus in Qatar. In the second part of the paper, I focus on how engineering students encounter US and Texas law in the branch campus and make strategic choices about their education based on their nationality. I argue that US and Texas law is both mobilized and suspended in Qatar to maintain and reinforce racialized hierarchies of expertise and labor. Through these mechanisms, the institution continues the work of promoting the U.S. as the center of expertise and mostly produces a managerial class structure to oversee technical labor in the fossil fuel industry and the military.