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Nearly 90 percent of residents in Dubai are foreigners with no Emirati nationality. As in many global cities, those who hold Western passports share specific advantages: prestigious careers, high salaries, and comfortable homes and lifestyles. With this book, Amélie Le Renard explores how race, gender and class backgrounds shape experiences of privilege, and investigates the processes that lead to the formation of Westerners as a social group. Westernness is more than a passport; it is also an identity that requires emotional and bodily labor. And as they work, hook up, parent, and hire domestic help, Westerners chase Dubai's promise of socioeconomic elevation for the few. Through an ethnography informed by postcolonial and feminist theory, Le Renard reveals the diverse experiences and trajectories of white and non-white, male and female Westerners to understand the shifting and contingent nature of Westernness—and also its deep connection to whiteness and heteronormativity. Western Privilege offers a singular look at the lived reality of structural racism in cities of the global South.

This article explores the Arabic-inspired performances devised by Thomas Binkley and the Studio der Frühen Musik, focusing on recent charges that these performances participate in the legacy of Orientalism described by Edward Said as 'a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient'. Convinced of the influence of Arabic culture on European culture during the Middle Ages, the Studio did indeed turn to contemporary Arabic culture in an attempt to construct what was believed to be its 'original' context and expressive voice. Although such Arabic-inspired performances appear to exemplify Orientalist discursive structures, I argue that Binkley's actions are considerably more complicated, especially when viewed against the burgeoning scholarship in Arabic and Hispanic studies. Drawing on a body of scholarly literature of Arabists, Hispanists and Orientalists in the 1960s that argues convincingly for the influence of Arabic culture in medieval Europe, I suggest that Binkley's Arabic-inspired performances offer a corrective to what Maria Rose Menocal has called 'the myth of Westernness', the systematic attempt to censor the Arabic or Semitic elements from European and Western history. This longstanding historiographical myth resembles Orientalism in that it is politically and ideologically motivated to assert Western superiority over the East. Besides understanding Binkley's performances as writing the Arabic back into European medieval history, I also argue that Binkley interpreted Arabic music as a manifestation of a highly developed culture rather than as a primitive or irrational society. Such a view could thus be read as challenging the colonialist attitudes still prevalent at the time. Indeed, by adopting Arabic practices and highlighting the cultivated traditions that existed on medieval soil, Binkley not only contested the assumption of an undeveloped, so-called, 'dark' Middle Ages, he challenged the idea of Western superiority at the very basis of Orientalism.