Styling coffee and performing taste : influencers' fashion and women-only social gatherings in the United Arab Emirates

Sharing Arabic coffee is a symbolic ritual of hospitality in the Persian Gulf, and in this chapter, coffee becomes a lens to examine how contemporary trends in coffee and sartorial fashion in the United Arab Emirates are performed in hospitality spaces and displayed in images shared on social media. The focus of this chapter is on young Emirati women influencers who post images of their personal fashion style and lifestyle tastes on Instagram. Using visual ethnography, this chapter explores themes built by the ‘coffee-cup shot’ in café locations, and the way in which drinking ‘traditional’ coffee is framed in images from home gatherings. The images investigated feature locally designed abayas accessorised by global luxury brands in coffee culture locations, and kaftans, which are styled by fashionable coffee utensils and worn to socialise at home. Drawing on the distinctions of taste and capital accumulation, the analysis of images, products and social practices situated within this cultural context considers how new meanings of fashion and coffee style are constructed through the influence of these imaging regimes

'Where the city dissolves' : suburban diasporas, psychosis and reparative writing

This chapter examines two recent literary works – Tim Lott’s 1996 memoir The Scent of Dried Roses and Bhanu Kapil’s experimental work, published in 2015, Ban en Banlieue – that examine mental illness in the context of histories of migration to London suburbs. Focusing on Southall in West London, each text develops a reparative mode of writing that attends closely to the historical and material processes that have shaped suburban lives but renders suspect both conventional autobiographical narrative and comprehensive forms of analysis

An alternative origin of nationalism in the East : the emergence of political subjectivity under the non-Western-centric world order

This chapter aims to critically examine consequences of the in-built Western centricity in social and political theories on our understanding of nationalism, in particular, regarding its origin and spread. Drawing from Eisenstadt’s multiple modernities thesis, this chapter explores possibility of alternative origins of nationalism by examining cases of Song China (960–1279), the Imjin War (1592–1598) and the rise of Kokugaku in eighteenth-century Japan to challenge the view that nationalism originated in the West and subsequently spread elsewhere