ABSTRACT
The precarity of temporary guest workers in the Arab Gulf States remains an underrepresented issue within global and transnational migration discourse that primarily focuses on the “flow,” the “flood” of migrants toward the gates of Europe and the US. While the migration crisis represents migrants in liquid imageries, sweeping across the West and threatening to overwhelm the cultural heritage of its citizens, the case is the opposite for immigrant workers in the Gulf States. In Temporary People (2017), a collection of 28 stories, Deepak Unnikrishnan explores the spectral condition of guest workers, predominately those from South Asia, as they maneuver their way through the prevailing exclusionary society and the inevitable hybridization of the two cultures. In this chapter, I propose decentering the mainstream migration narratives that revolve around the Rest approaching the West. The liminal space of Arab Gulf States, extensively first worldly, problematizes spaces of inclusion and exclusions, and thus, spectral workers remain to be marginalized. Modernity produces “redundant people” as Zygmunt Bauman argues. However, Unnikrishnan complicates this redundancy as temporary foreign workers hover on the brink of being integral to the nation and state building despite being peripheral, while also forever chasing the unattainable sense of belonging.
