Abu Dhabi’s rapid urbanization and infrastructural development in the 1960s and 1970s accompanied a significant demographic shift, including a large inflow of South Asian migrant labor, particularly from the state of Kerala. My dissertation project, tentatively titled “Ghost Houses” studies the durable, material and social transformations in both Kerala and Abu Dhabi which emerged out of these migrant labor networks often thought of as transient, liminal and temporary. My work ties together the houses built in rural Kerala through remittances and cyclical migration to Abu Dhabi’s urban development. I focus on the “remittance landscape” of both Abu Dhabi and Kerala, arguing that space in both locations is reconfigured by family finance networks of debt and remittances. Through these extractive labor relations built on precarity, transnational, material shifts in topographical and socio-political landscapes are produced. My connected history approach across the Indian Ocean aims to dismantle the notion that laboring in urban areas abroad led to upward socioeconomic mobility in rural places “back home” while examining the ways that these networks impacted the lived realities of Keralites.
Researcher: Lena Nasrallah