Gulf Dreams is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood.

"A powerful, gripping, and disturbing story of passion and betrayal, survival and vengeance, compulsion and resilience, told in arresting images and fragmented, dreamlike narrative."--Teresa de Lauretis, professor of History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz "This amalgam of life history, creative non-fiction, psychoanalytic treatise and fictionalized memoirs is a welcome addition to queer literature."--Gloria Anzaldúa, author of Borderlands Gulf Dreams is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood.

On Saadiyat Island, just off the coast of Abu Dhabi, branches of iconic cultural institutions, including the Louvre, the Guggenheim, the British Museum and New York University, are taking shape to the designs of starchitects such as Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, Zaha Hadid, and Norman Foster. In this way, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) seeks to burnish its reputation as a sophisticated destination for wealthy visitors and residents. Beneath the glossy veneer of the Saadiyat real estate plan, however, lies a tawdry reality. Those laboring on the construction sites are migrant workers who arrive from poor countries heavily indebted as a result of recruitment and transit fees. Once in the UAE the sponsoring employer takes their passports, houses them in sub-standard labor camps, pays much less than they were promised, and enforces a punishing work regimen. If they protest publicly, they risk arrest, beatings, and deportation. For five years, the Gulf Labor Coalition, a cosmopolitan group of artists and writers, has been pressuring Saadiyat’s Western cultural brands to ensure worker protections. Gulf Labor has coordinated a boycott of the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and pioneered innovative direct action that has involved several spectacular museum occupations. As part of a year-long initiative, an array of artists, writers, and activists submitted a work, a text, or an action. Contextualized by essays that trace how Gulf Labor has evolved, their contributions are reproduced in this book. The result is a compelling chronicle of a campaign at the forefront of a new wave of world-wide cultural activism. Written contributions by: Haig Aivazian, Mounira Al Solh, Ayreen Anastas, Kadambari Baxi, Doris Bittar, Jordan Carver, Paula Chakravartty, Nitasha Dhillon, Rene Gabri, Mariam Ghani, the Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.), Hans Haacke, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Naeem Mohaiemen, Walid Raad, Andrew Ross, Gregory Sholette and Mabel Wilson. Artwork contributions by: Hend Al Mansour, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Todd Ayoung and Jelena Stojanovic, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, Emily Verla Bovino, CAMP, Collective of Artists, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Sam Durant, Claire Fontaine, Andrea Fraser, Mariam Ghani, Paul Graham, G.U.L.F., Gulf Labor West, Hans Haacke, Rawi Hage, Pablo Helguera, Thomas Hirschhorn, Aaron Hughes and Sarah Farahat, The Illuminator, John Jurayj, Janet Koenig, Silvia Kolbowski, Lynn Love and Ann Sappenfield,Guy Mannes-Abbott, Mazatl, Pat McElnea, Jasa Mrevlje, Marina Naprushkina, Jenny Polak, Walid Raad, Georges Rabbath, Jayce Salloum, Rasha Salti, Dread Scott, Gregory Sholette and Matthew Greco, Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer, Nida Sinnokrot, Situ Studio, Suha Traboulsi and Jaret Vadera.

For centuries, men dreamed of cutting a canal across the Florida peninsula. Intended to reduce shipping times, it was championed in the early twentieth century as a way to make the mostly rural state a center of national commerce and trade. Rejected by the Army Corps of Engineers as "not worthy," the project received continued support from Florida legislators. Federal funding was eventually allocated and work began in the 1930s, but the canal quickly became a lightning rod for controversy. Steven Noll and David Tegeder trace the twists and turns of the project through the years, drawing on a wealth of archival and primary sources. Far from being a simplistic morality tale of good environmentalists versus evil canal developers, the story of the Cross Florida Barge Canal is a complex one of competing interests amid the changing political landscape of modern Florida. Thanks to the unprecedented success of environmental citizen activists, construction was halted in 1971, though it took another twenty years for the project to be canceled. Though the land intended for the canal was deeded to the state and converted into the Cross Florida Greenway, certain aspects of the dispute--including the fate of Rodman Reservoir--have yet to be resolved.

Homecoming Queers provides a critical discussion of the multiple strategies used by queer Latina authors and artists in the United States to challenge silence and invisibility within mainstream media, literary canons, and theater spaces. Marivel T. Danielson's analysis reveals the extensive legacy of these cultural artists, including novelists, filmmakers, students and activists, comedians, performers, and playwrights. By clearly discussing the complexities and universalities of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and class intersections between queer Chicana and U.S. Latinas, Danielson explores the multiple ways identity shapes and shades creative expression. Weaknesses and gaps are revealed in the treatment of difference as a whole, within dominant and marginalized communities. Spanning multiple genres and forms, and including scholarly theory alongside performances, films, narratives, and testimonials, Homecoming Queers leads readers along a crucial path toward understanding and overcoming the silences that previously existed across these fields.

An intimate portrait of Egyptian migrants' lives and hopes, and their return home A vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states, Migrant Dreams is about the imagination which migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home. What kind of dreams for a good or better life drives labor migrants? What does being a migrant worker do to one’s hopes and ambitions? How does the experience of migration to the Gulf, with its attendant economic and legal precarities, shape migrants’ particular dreams of a better life? What do those dreams—be they realistic and productive, or fantastic and unlikely—do to the social worlds of the people who pursue them, and to their families and communities back home upon their return? Based on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and conversations with Egyptian men from mostly low-income rural backgrounds who migrated as workers to the Gulf, returned home, and migrated again over a period of about a decade, this fine-grained study explores and engages with these questions and more, as the men reflect on their strivings and the dreams they hope to fulfill. Throughout the book, Samuli Schielke highlights the story of one man, Tawfiq, who is particularly gifted at analyzing his own situation and struggles, resulting in a richly nuanced account that will appeal not only to Middle East scholars, but to anyone interested in the lived lives of labor migrants and what their experiences ultimately mean to them.