Author: Bissell, William Cunningham
Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers
ISBN: 998708317X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406
Book Description
This volume focuses on the cultural memory and mediation of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, analyzing it’s continuing reverberations in everyday life. The revolution constructed new conceptions of community and identity, race and cultural belonging, as well as instituting different ideals of nationhood, citizenship, sovereignty. As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution revealed, the official versions of events have shifted significantly over time and the legacy of the uprising is still deeply contested. In these debates, the question of Zanzibari identity remains very much at stake: Who exactly belongs in the islands and what historical processes brought them there? What are the boundaries of the nation, and who can claim to be an essential part of this imagined and embodied community? Political belonging and power are closely intertwined with these issues of identity and history—raising intense debates and divisions over precisely where Zanzibar should be situated within the national order of things in a postcolonial and interconnected world. Attending to narratives that have been overlooked, ignored, or relegated to the margins, the authors of these essays do not seek to simply define the revolution or to establish its ultimate meaning. Instead, they seek to explore the continuing echoes and traces of the revolution fifty years on, reflected in memories, media, and monuments. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, history, cultural studies, and geography, these essays foreground critical debates about the revolution, often conducted sotto voce and located well off the official stage—attending to long silenced questions, submerged doubts, rumors and secrets, or things that cannot be said.
Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle
Author: Bissell, William Cunningham
Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers
ISBN: 998708317X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406
Book Description
This volume focuses on the cultural memory and mediation of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, analyzing it’s continuing reverberations in everyday life. The revolution constructed new conceptions of community and identity, race and cultural belonging, as well as instituting different ideals of nationhood, citizenship, sovereignty. As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution revealed, the official versions of events have shifted significantly over time and the legacy of the uprising is still deeply contested. In these debates, the question of Zanzibari identity remains very much at stake: Who exactly belongs in the islands and what historical processes brought them there? What are the boundaries of the nation, and who can claim to be an essential part of this imagined and embodied community? Political belonging and power are closely intertwined with these issues of identity and history—raising intense debates and divisions over precisely where Zanzibar should be situated within the national order of things in a postcolonial and interconnected world. Attending to narratives that have been overlooked, ignored, or relegated to the margins, the authors of these essays do not seek to simply define the revolution or to establish its ultimate meaning. Instead, they seek to explore the continuing echoes and traces of the revolution fifty years on, reflected in memories, media, and monuments. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, history, cultural studies, and geography, these essays foreground critical debates about the revolution, often conducted sotto voce and located well off the official stage—attending to long silenced questions, submerged doubts, rumors and secrets, or things that cannot be said.
Publisher: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers
ISBN: 998708317X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406
Book Description
This volume focuses on the cultural memory and mediation of the 1964 Zanzibar revolution, analyzing it’s continuing reverberations in everyday life. The revolution constructed new conceptions of community and identity, race and cultural belonging, as well as instituting different ideals of nationhood, citizenship, sovereignty. As the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the revolution revealed, the official versions of events have shifted significantly over time and the legacy of the uprising is still deeply contested. In these debates, the question of Zanzibari identity remains very much at stake: Who exactly belongs in the islands and what historical processes brought them there? What are the boundaries of the nation, and who can claim to be an essential part of this imagined and embodied community? Political belonging and power are closely intertwined with these issues of identity and history—raising intense debates and divisions over precisely where Zanzibar should be situated within the national order of things in a postcolonial and interconnected world. Attending to narratives that have been overlooked, ignored, or relegated to the margins, the authors of these essays do not seek to simply define the revolution or to establish its ultimate meaning. Instead, they seek to explore the continuing echoes and traces of the revolution fifty years on, reflected in memories, media, and monuments. Inspired by interdisciplinary perspectives from anthropology, history, cultural studies, and geography, these essays foreground critical debates about the revolution, often conducted sotto voce and located well off the official stage—attending to long silenced questions, submerged doubts, rumors and secrets, or things that cannot be said.
Zanzibar Was a Country
Author: Nathaniel Mathews
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520400704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
Zanzibar Was a Country traces the history of a Swahili-speaking Arab diaspora from East Africa to Oman. In Oman today, whole communities in Muscat speak Swahili, have recent East African roots, and practice forms of sociality associated with the urban culture of the Swahili coast. These "Omani Zanzibaris" offer the most significant contemporary example in the Gulf, as well as in the wider Indian Ocean region, of an Afro-Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in a diasporic setting. While they come from all over East Africa, a large number are postrevolution exiles and emigrés from Zanzibar. Their stories provide a framework for the broader transregional entanglements of decolonization in Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Using both vernacular historiography and life histories of men and women from the community, Nathaniel Mathews argues that the traumatic memories of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 are important to nation-building on both sides of the Indian Ocean.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520400704
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
Zanzibar Was a Country traces the history of a Swahili-speaking Arab diaspora from East Africa to Oman. In Oman today, whole communities in Muscat speak Swahili, have recent East African roots, and practice forms of sociality associated with the urban culture of the Swahili coast. These "Omani Zanzibaris" offer the most significant contemporary example in the Gulf, as well as in the wider Indian Ocean region, of an Afro-Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in a diasporic setting. While they come from all over East Africa, a large number are postrevolution exiles and emigrés from Zanzibar. Their stories provide a framework for the broader transregional entanglements of decolonization in Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Using both vernacular historiography and life histories of men and women from the community, Nathaniel Mathews argues that the traumatic memories of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 are important to nation-building on both sides of the Indian Ocean.
Across the Waves
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004510109
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
This collection offers insights into how the people of the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Comoros negotiate their social and political belonging in these societies, created through waves of migration across the ocean.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004510109
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
This collection offers insights into how the people of the Indian Ocean islands of Zanzibar, Madagascar, Mauritius and the Comoros negotiate their social and political belonging in these societies, created through waves of migration across the ocean.
Navigating Socialist Encounters
Author: Eric Burton
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311062382X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311062382X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
Book Description
This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.
Society of the Righteous
Author: Kimberly T. Wortmann
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025307116X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
""This is a highly original work, a signal contribution not only to the emerging field of Ibadi studies, but also to students and scholars of Islamic, African, and Middle Eastern studies. ... Wortmann demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of scholarship and considers multiple factors in her analysis, including history, language, ethnicity, nationalism, education, social structure, the function of charitable associations, and economics." - Valerie Hoffman, author of The Essentials of Ibadi Islam. "This is a major contribution to understanding contemporary Ibadi society in Tanzania and how it remains shaped by cross-regional networks of belonging. It also goes deep into its daily ways of operation and the role of Ibadi women in shaping Ibadi presence in Tanzania. The chapter on Ibadi women in particular is a welcome addition to the literature on Muslim communities in East Africa." - Amal Ghazal, author of Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1880s-1930s.
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025307116X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
""This is a highly original work, a signal contribution not only to the emerging field of Ibadi studies, but also to students and scholars of Islamic, African, and Middle Eastern studies. ... Wortmann demonstrates familiarity with a wide range of scholarship and considers multiple factors in her analysis, including history, language, ethnicity, nationalism, education, social structure, the function of charitable associations, and economics." - Valerie Hoffman, author of The Essentials of Ibadi Islam. "This is a major contribution to understanding contemporary Ibadi society in Tanzania and how it remains shaped by cross-regional networks of belonging. It also goes deep into its daily ways of operation and the role of Ibadi women in shaping Ibadi presence in Tanzania. The chapter on Ibadi women in particular is a welcome addition to the literature on Muslim communities in East Africa." - Amal Ghazal, author of Islamic Reform and Arab Nationalism: Expanding the Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1880s-1930s.
African Women and Their Networks of Support
Author: Elene Cloete
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793607400
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
African Women and their Networks of Support: Intervening Connections is an interdisciplinary analysis of how African women, in their different cultural, social, and political spaces, find innovative strategies to address the challenge they face and voice their often-underrepresented perspectives. These actions are often molded in either formal or informal networks of support that provide women with the necessary peer-based foundation to deal with gender discrimination, violence, and subjugation. On other occasions, women’s strategies toward change are driven by specific individuals who set the transformative agenda and trajectory toward social change. Contributors label these efforts as intervening connections, representing women's intentional actions to circumvent, disrupt, question, and ultimately rearrange structures of gender discrimination. Respective chapters capture networks that are historic and current; real, virtual, and imagined; local and transnational, and managed by women on the continent as well as in the diaspora. Considering these diverse spaces in which networking happens, contributors underscore not only how African women aim at deconstructing current systemic gender inequalities, but also how they are developing futures of gender equity and equality.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793607400
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 251
Book Description
African Women and their Networks of Support: Intervening Connections is an interdisciplinary analysis of how African women, in their different cultural, social, and political spaces, find innovative strategies to address the challenge they face and voice their often-underrepresented perspectives. These actions are often molded in either formal or informal networks of support that provide women with the necessary peer-based foundation to deal with gender discrimination, violence, and subjugation. On other occasions, women’s strategies toward change are driven by specific individuals who set the transformative agenda and trajectory toward social change. Contributors label these efforts as intervening connections, representing women's intentional actions to circumvent, disrupt, question, and ultimately rearrange structures of gender discrimination. Respective chapters capture networks that are historic and current; real, virtual, and imagined; local and transnational, and managed by women on the continent as well as in the diaspora. Considering these diverse spaces in which networking happens, contributors underscore not only how African women aim at deconstructing current systemic gender inequalities, but also how they are developing futures of gender equity and equality.
Mystical Power and Politics on the Swahili Coast
Author: DR NATHALIE ARNOLD. KOENINGS
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847013848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
Traces changing visions of mystical power and authority on the island of Pemba, whose people's reputed resistance to outside rule has shaped the national narratives of both Zanzibar and Tanzania. For two centuries, Pemba, the second largest island of Zanzibar, has been known by East Africans and outsiders alike as rich in dangerous knowledge. Despite Pembans' reputation for piety and deep Islamic knowledge, uchawi- 'mystical work and power', sometimes termed 'magic', 'witchcraft', or 'sorcery' - has long featured in diverse visions of their identity and as key to worldly power. Today, as traditional methods of securing agency are called into question and new ways proliferate, the mystical world is an intensely conflicted realm where the nature of power, ethical action, and reality itself is continually reframed. This luminous ethnography follows Pemban notions of invisible and worldly power through the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the trials of multiparty democracy, the rise of Islamic revival, and intensifying neoliberalism. Through an exploration of rural imaginings of power, it argues that nations and the grammars that underwrite them are made in and by their peripheries, which give 'the centre' shape. Highlighting the intersections of mystical practices, religion, and politics-as-such on the Swahili Coast, the book contributes new perspectives to studies of the imagination, power, and religious transformation in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the larger Islamic world.
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847013848
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311
Book Description
Traces changing visions of mystical power and authority on the island of Pemba, whose people's reputed resistance to outside rule has shaped the national narratives of both Zanzibar and Tanzania. For two centuries, Pemba, the second largest island of Zanzibar, has been known by East Africans and outsiders alike as rich in dangerous knowledge. Despite Pembans' reputation for piety and deep Islamic knowledge, uchawi- 'mystical work and power', sometimes termed 'magic', 'witchcraft', or 'sorcery' - has long featured in diverse visions of their identity and as key to worldly power. Today, as traditional methods of securing agency are called into question and new ways proliferate, the mystical world is an intensely conflicted realm where the nature of power, ethical action, and reality itself is continually reframed. This luminous ethnography follows Pemban notions of invisible and worldly power through the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the trials of multiparty democracy, the rise of Islamic revival, and intensifying neoliberalism. Through an exploration of rural imaginings of power, it argues that nations and the grammars that underwrite them are made in and by their peripheries, which give 'the centre' shape. Highlighting the intersections of mystical practices, religion, and politics-as-such on the Swahili Coast, the book contributes new perspectives to studies of the imagination, power, and religious transformation in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the larger Islamic world.
Zanzibari Muslim Moderns
Author: Anne K Bang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019779775X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
Reveals how a generation of Muslim scholars, intellectuals and civil servants adapted and adopted ideas of modernity in colonial interwar Zanzibar.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019779775X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
Reveals how a generation of Muslim scholars, intellectuals and civil servants adapted and adopted ideas of modernity in colonial interwar Zanzibar.
"Invisible Cities" and the Urban Imagination
Author: Benjamin Linder
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031130480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Book Description
In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031130480
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355
Book Description
In 1972, Italo Calvino published Invisible Cities, a literary book that masterfully combines philosophy and poetry, rigid structure and free play, theoretical insight and glittering prose. The text is an extended meditation on urban life, and it continues to resonate not only among literary scholars, but among social scientists, architects, and urban planners as well. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Invisible Cities, this collection of essays serves as both an appreciation and a critical engagement. Drawing from a wide array of disciplinary perspectives and geographical contexts, this volume grapples with the theoretical, pedagogical, and political legacies of Calvino’s work. Each chapter approaches Invisible Cities not only as a novel but as a work of evocative ethnography, place-writing, and urban theory. Fifty years on, what can Calvino’s dreamlike text offer to scholars and practitioners interested in actually existing urban life?
The Politics of Biography in Africa
Author: Anaïs Angelo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000432688
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
Bringing together historians, political scientists, and literary analysts, this volume shows how biographical narratives can shed light on alternative, little known or under-researched aspects of state power in African politics. Part 1 shows how biographical narratives breathe new life into subjects who, upon decolonization, had been reduced to silence - women, workers, and radical politicians. The contributors analyze the complex relationship between biographical narratives and power, questioning either the power of biographical codes peculiar to western, colonial origins, or the power to shape public memory. Part 2 reflects on the act of (auto-)biography writing as an exercise of power, one that blurs the lines between truth and invention. (Auto-)biographical narratives appear as politicized, ambiguous stories. Part 3 focuses on female leadership during and after colonization, exploring on how women gained, lost, or reinvented "power". Brought together, the contributions of this volume show that the function of biographical narratives should no longer oscillate between romanticized narratives and historical evidence; their varied formats all offer fruitful opportunities for a multidisciplinary dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds working on the African postcolonial state, the decolonization process, women’s and gender studies, and biography writing.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000432688
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187
Book Description
Bringing together historians, political scientists, and literary analysts, this volume shows how biographical narratives can shed light on alternative, little known or under-researched aspects of state power in African politics. Part 1 shows how biographical narratives breathe new life into subjects who, upon decolonization, had been reduced to silence - women, workers, and radical politicians. The contributors analyze the complex relationship between biographical narratives and power, questioning either the power of biographical codes peculiar to western, colonial origins, or the power to shape public memory. Part 2 reflects on the act of (auto-)biography writing as an exercise of power, one that blurs the lines between truth and invention. (Auto-)biographical narratives appear as politicized, ambiguous stories. Part 3 focuses on female leadership during and after colonization, exploring on how women gained, lost, or reinvented "power". Brought together, the contributions of this volume show that the function of biographical narratives should no longer oscillate between romanticized narratives and historical evidence; their varied formats all offer fruitful opportunities for a multidisciplinary dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds working on the African postcolonial state, the decolonization process, women’s and gender studies, and biography writing.