Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Joyriding in Riyadh
  • Cited by 141
      • Show more authors
      • You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Select format
    • Publisher:
      Cambridge University Press
      Publication date:
      05 July 2014
      21 April 2014
      ISBN:
      9781139548946
      9781107035485
      9781107641952
      DOI:
      https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139548946
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.49kg, 263 Pages
      Dimensions:
      (228 x 152 mm)
      Weight & Pages:
      0.37kg, 263 Pages
      • Subjects:
      Middle East Studies, Area Studies, History, Middle East History, Middle East Government,Politics and Policy
      Series:
      Cambridge Middle East Studies (45)
    You may already have access via personal or institutional login
    • Selected: Digital
    Add to cart View cart Buy from Cambridge.org
    Subjects:
    Middle East Studies, Area Studies, History, Middle East History, Middle East Government,Politics and Policy
    Series:
    Cambridge Middle East Studies (45)
    Information

    Book description

    Why do young Saudis, night after night, joyride and skid cars on Riyadh's avenues? Who are these 'drifters' who defy public order and private property? What drives their revolt? Based on four years of fieldwork in Riyadh, Pascal Menoret's Joyriding in Riyadh explores the social fabric of the city and connects it to Saudi Arabia's recent history. Car drifting emerged after Riyadh was planned, and oil became the main driver of the economy. For young rural migrants, it was a way to reclaim alienating and threatening urban spaces. For the Saudi state, it jeopardized its most basic operations: managing public spaces and enforcing law and order. A police crackdown soon targeted car drifting, feeding a nation-wide moral panic led by religious activists who framed youth culture as a public issue. This book retraces the politicization of Riyadh youth and shows that, far from being a marginal event, car drifting is embedded in the country's social violence and economic inequality.

    Awards

    Winner of the 2015 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize

    An Economist Book of the Year 2014

    Reviews

    'Good anthropologists aim to enter into the minds of their subjects, sharing their lifestyle, acquiring their language, studying their moods and responses but always maintaining an objective self-awareness. Pascal Menoret is better than good.'

    Source: The Economist

    'An excellent ethnography of youth culture in Saudi Arabia that unpacks the connections between the social practice of joyriding as a form of political dissent with the questions of oil, urbanism, and power. It provides new insight into the categories of masculinity and gender in the Middle Eastern context and the spatial politics of the Saudi state. This work contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship … Joyriding in Riyadh is an excellent and scholarly work that makes a valuable contribution to the field of Middle East Studies. It will appeal to anyone that has an interest in youth culture, urban and gender studies, urban history, and anthropology of the Middle East. Moreover, the book can be assigned to classes on Middle Eastern politics, Arab Uprisings, or any course that deals with the issues of social violence and economic inequality in a comparative or global framework.'

    Feras Klenk Source: Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

    'Menoret has written one of the best books on contemporary Saudi Arabia. I applaud the author’s bravery in undertaking fieldwork among violent, repressed, and disenfranchised young men in the kingdom during the years of the War on Terror. He elegantly combines an intimate portrayal of Saudi male youth culture with a profound analysis of the national and global networks of government, business, and expertise that gave rise to joyriding.'

    Jörg Matthias Determann Source: The American Historical Review

    'This is an insightful, important and unique book. It is extremely readable and will be accessible to students of all levels, as well as others inside and outside academia with an interest in the Gulf, urban history and politics, and gender and sexuality in the Middle East.'

    Michael Farquhar Source: LSE Middle East Centre Blog (blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec)

    Refine List

    Actions for selected content:

    Select all | Deselect all
    • View selected items
    • Export citations
    • Download PDF (zip)
    • Save to Kindle
    • Save to Dropbox
    • Save to Google Drive

    Save Search

    You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

    Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
    Cancel
    ×

    Contents

    Contents
    • 1 - A Night with ‘Ajib
      pp 1-20
        • You have access
      • PDF
      • Export citation
    References

    Metrics

    Altmetric attention score

    Full text views

    Total number of HTML views: 0
    Total number of PDF views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    Book summary page views

    Total views: 0 *
    Loading metrics...

    * Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

    Usage data cannot currently be displayed.

    Accessibility standard: Unknown

    Why this information is here

    This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

    Accessibility Information

    Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.