Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil is as ethnographically evocative as it is historically sensitive, charting the worlds and journeys of aspiring labor migrants betwixt and between their homes in India and places of work in the oil-rich Arabian Gulf. With an eye to colonial precedent and genealogy in contemporary processes of labor migration, Andrea Wright traces a longer historical arc of oil production, Indian emigration law, and transregional capital flows that refuses the presentist bias so prevalent in accounts of labor migration to the Gulf. By weaving together the lived realities of migrants in and between their villages in India and the oil fields of the Gulf, the author also offers up a glimpse of what it means to inhabit multiple spaces and chronologies at once. Any neat distinction between here/there, local/global, and now/then is thoroughly unsettled. What emerges from this premise, as the book...

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