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Somewhere in the course of the late twentieth century, Dubai became more than itself. The city was, suddenly, a postmodern urban spectacle rising from the desert--precisely the glittering global consumer utopia imagined by Dubai's rulers and merchant elite. In "Dubai, the City as Corporation," Ahmed Kanna looks behind this seductive vision to reveal the role of cultural and political forces in shaping both the image and the reality of Dubai. Exposing local struggles over power and meaning in the making and representation of Dubai, Kanna examines the core questions of what gets built

Eleanor Burke Leacock taught that transhistorical, universal male dominance is a myth, not a fact. Writing during the grimmest period of Cold War reaction, Leacock put forward a critique of the mainstream U.S. ideology, which took for granted the idea that there were only two genders, in binary opposition to each other, and that these were the direct product of so-called male and female nature.

The Arab Gulf remains a marginalized, even unfashionable, area of research in the Middle East academy. In spite of—or maybe because of—this marginality, the region offers an interesting vantage point for reflecting on the production of knowledge about geographic and cultural regions. The frame of knowledge production casts into relief discourses of "the city" in Middle East, and particularly Gulf, studies over the past decade.

The contributions by Bishara, Deeb and Harb, Silverstein, and Winegar explore the ways non-state actors confront nationalist state projects. If these projects are not always foregrounded, the modernist nationalist state is nevertheless always in the background in each case, inviting an examination and critique of the "political commodifications of culture." Here, I take a different approach to the culture concept in struggles between modernizing states and their subjects. Particularly suggestive in Winegar's piece on Egypt and Deeb and Harb's on Lebanon is the ethico-cultural dimension ofthaqafa, its injunction to the would-bemuthaqqafto self-regulate, to refine the sensibilities, and so on. As the authors point out, there is an arguably Eurocentric and statist bias whenthaqafais deployed in this way. Part of this aspect ofthaqafais an implicit condescension toward "folk" (i.e., non-state) traditions, which are represented as retrogressive.

Arguing that the focus in global urban studies on cities such as New York, London, Tokyo in the global North, Mexico City and Shanghai in the developing world, and other major nodes of the world economy, has skewed the concept of the global city toward economics, this volume gathers a diverse group of contributors to focus on smaller and less economically dominant cities. It highlights other important and relatively ignored themes such as cultural globalization, alternative geographies of the global, and the influence of deeper urban histories (particularly those relating to colonialism) in order to advance an alternative view of the global city.