ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the themes, forms and conventions of literary and filmic responses to petro-migrants in Dubai, with a particular focus on spatial metaphors and taxis as inter-class encounter zones in Shamlal Puri’s Dubai Dreams: The Rough Road to Riches (2010), which portrays the lives of a group of Indian taxi drivers in Dubai, and in Ali F. Mostafa’s film City of Life (2009), which centres on Dubai’s transnational urbanites. Proceeding from Amitav Ghosh’s (2002) pioneering essay, ‘Petrofiction: The oil encounter and the novel.’ where Ghosh maintains that despite its dramatic nature, any literary engagement with the oil encounter and its main protagonists has remained ‘imaginatively sterile.’ cultural representations of the lives of labour migrants in the Gulf states do not only provide alternative narratives to Ghosh’s stated notion of the ‘muteness of the Oil Encounter.’ but they also emphasise the need for more critical analyses of the nexus between postcolonial and working-class literature.
