Properties of Aspiration and Persons in Exile: Middle Class Iranians in Dubai

This is a paper about ‘property’ and ‘persons’ in the context of migration. Focusing on middle class Iranian residents of Dubai, it draws from ethnographic research conducted between 2010–2012 and examines their shared engagement with urban transformation as an ‘ethical’ project; that is, as a opportunity to inhabit a certain kind of personhood (one imagined to be hindered in Iran) by means of inhabiting a certain kind of urbanity (one imagined to represent an Iran that might have been).
Studies of the Iranian diaspora continue to amplify the trope of exile, focusing on the structures of feeling and social practices implicated in its shared experience. Such scholarship has often engaged Iranian interlocutors in cities of the ‘Global North’, while elaborating exilic sentiments in terms of rupture from an historical homeland. This paper looks to contribute to the study of diasporic Iranian life by departing from this trend in two respects: 1) examining Iranian life in a Persian Gulf city-state where permanent residency and citizenship are unavailable, 2) and elaborating a sense of exile that is informed not by a break from the past but from a potential future.
To this end, it will explore how Dubai’s superlative cityscape was imagined by so many middle class Iranians to signal this city’s arrival into a displaced Iran modernity, and how their practices of inhabiting or speculating in its real estate were often informed by connotations of being the denizens of this Iran in potentia.