Andrea Wright - Between Dreams and Ghosts

Podcast: Lekh Episode: Andrea Wright - Between Dreams and Ghosts Pub date: 2022-07-10 Get Podcast Transcript → powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarization In the 27th episode, I speak to Andrea Wright, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary, on her recent book Between Dreams and Ghosts Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford University Press, 2021). The book's an ethnography of Indian migration to the Gulf, focusing on workers in oil and gas projects in UW and Kuwait. Around a million Indians travel to the Gulf per year to work on such projects, largely men without formalized skills or education. The book captures their journey through the men making the trips, the recruiting agents and intermediaries enabling their employment, and government bureaucrats regulating such migrations. Such processes, as Wright argues, are part of larger trends related to global capitalism and neoliberalism that necessitate the need and demand for such labour and the actors who serve specific functions to fuel capital accumulation. The conversation begins by asking what led to Wright's interest in migration and Indian migration to the Gulf before exploring how this issue has been covered and explained by various literatures and why a different take was needed. Next, we unpack the book's arresting title and how poetics related to 'dreams and ghosts' are crucial to how migrants themselves situate their role in this process. Then we move to understand the methodology behind the project that involves multiple sites and the difficulties inherent in designing and implementing such a research exercise across countries. Conceptually, the book looks at migration through specific economic systems or logics, namely neoliberalism and Wright explains how this framing helped her think through the project. We close by understanding the role of the Indian state in this project/process, the role that gold plays in sustaining relations across continents, and what Wright thought was the hardest part of writing the book. The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Karthik Nachiappan, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.