"Host & Server" traces the contemporary global shift away from the permanent and the national toward the temporary and transnational in the global cities of Dubai, Los Angeles, and Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon. The term "temporariness" is used to conceptualize the structures of feeling that emerge alongside the growing phenomena of provisional labor and transitory migration that correspond with the increase of globalization and neoliberalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These rapidly growing cities are icons of the opportunity and development offered by the promises of globalization and neoliberal economic policies, which have ushered in increased free trade, deregulation, and privatization since the 1980s. The dissertation argues that the opportunities and promises of prosperity are not equally available to all, and we can, instead, observe the rise of temporariness as a sign of these inequalities. The temporariness of life for workers in neoliberal networks of trade and governance can benefit some, while disenfranchising others, and the distribution of benefit is often divided along hemispheric, national, racial, and gendered lines. Such differences make themselves visible in the attendant multimedia texts that emerge alongside these developments.