A flying man, a scuttled ship, and a timekeeping device: Reflections on Ibn Battuta mall

Public Culture

Volumn 23, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 541-549

  Günel, Gökçe ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84855674956     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-1336408     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Ibn Battuta Mall website, www.ibnbattutamall.com (accessed April 18, 2011).
2. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, "Edutaining Dubai," Saudi Aramco World, March-April 2008, www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200802/edutaining.dubai.htm.
3. Mackintosh-Smith is a travel writer who in recent years has traced the footsteps of Ibn Battuta. In 2010 he visited Ibn Battuta Mall for a book signing, after the publication of Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah, the final book in his trilogy.
4. Mackintosh-Smith, "Edutaining Dubai."
5. Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (1992): 22
6. Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics," 22-23
7. Peter Sloterdijk, "The Absolute Island," in Olafur Eliasson: Minding the World, ed. Olafur Eliasson and Gitte Orskou (Denmark: ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, 2004), 161.
8. Sloterdijk, "Absolute Island," 162
9. The imagineering consultants for the Ibn Battuta Mall were from MTE Studios, a South Africa-based firm that provides themed architecture services. During a conversation at the Cityscape Abu Dhabi Trade Show on April 11, 2011, an executive from MTE Studios explained that the master developer, Nakheel Properties, had approached the company to design a "more Arabic mall that has a story." MTE Studios later came up with the six courts illustrating Ibn Battuta's travels. At the end, huge spaces were left in the middle of the courts. The MTE Studios executive remarked that he had seen an illustration of the elephant clock in a manuscript and decided that it would be perfect for India Court. The iconic figures were later manufactured in MTE's South Africa workshop and transported to Dubai. The executive also pointed out that frequent changes in the management following the economic recession have led to a lack of maintenance in the mall. "Because this is not a museum, when the management changes there is nothing you can do in regards to maintenance," he concluded. MTE Studios' other mall project in Dubai, called Mercato Mall, imitates a stereotypically Italian streetscape.
10. Ibn Battuta Mall website, www.ibnbattutamall.com (accessed April 18, 2011).
11. This argument is inspired by an analysis of world fairs found in Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 1-34
12. L. P. Harvey, Ibn Battuta (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007).
13. See also Fathi A. El-Shihibi, "Travel Genre in Arabic Literature: A Selective Literary and Historical Study" (PhD diss., Boston University, 1998).
14. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1994)
15. Peter Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals (In the Inner World Space of Capital) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), 26
16. Sloterdijk, Kapitalist dünyani{dotless}n iç-evreninde (In the Inner World Space of Capital), trans. İ lknur Aka (Istanbul: Ki{dotless}rmi{dotless}zi{dotless}, 2008).
17. In referring specifically to the conditions of workers in Dubai, Mike Davis writes: "In addition to being superexploited, Dubai's helots - like the proletariat in Fritz Lang's Metropolis - are also expected to be generally invisible. The local press. .. is restrained from reporting on migrant workers, exploitative working conditions, and prostitution. Likewise, 'Asian laborers are banned from the glitzy shopping malls, new golf courses, and smart restaurants.' Nor are the bleak work camps on the city's outskirts - where laborers are crowded six, eight, or even twelve to a room, often without air-conditioning or functioning toilets - part of the official tourist image of a city of luxury, without poverty or slums."
18. Mike Davis, "Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai," in Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, ed. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (New York: New Press, 2007), 65.
19. See also David Keane and Nicholas McGeehan, "Enforcing Migrant Workers' Rights in the United Arab Emirates," International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 15 (2008): 81-115
20. Sulayman Khalaf and Saad al-Kobaisi, "Migrants' Strategies of Coping and Patterns of Accommodation in the Oil-Rich Gulf Societies: Evidence from the UAE," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 26 (1999): 271-98
21. Sloterdijk, Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals, 26
22. Sloterdijk, Kapitalist dünyani{dotless}n iç-evreninde, 28 (my translation)