Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship between East Africa and the Gulf By Nathaniel Mathews

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Titre
Zanzibar Was a Country: Exile and Citizenship between East Africa and the Gulf By Nathaniel Mathews
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Sujet
Résumé
Tracing the lives, experiences, and ideas of Zanzibari Arabs through rich oral and written archives, Zanzibar Was a Country demonstrates the significance of “experiences in diaspora” to Indian Ocean postcolonial national belonging (2). Belonging, in Mathews’ rendering, refers to both “sentiment” —the idea of Zanzibar as a sovereign state and collective attachment to it—and citizenship—recognized political status and the infrastructures that produce it. The book makes two key intersecting interventions: first, by examining the political economy of citizenship from the era of developmental colonialism to the hydrocarbon-fueled developmentalism of the Arabian Gulf, Mathews presents an important analysis of decolonization as an economic process in which the tensions of the late colonial era continued. Second, he explores the complex and diverse articulations of Zanzibari-Omani belonging that emerged among diasporic Zanzibaris in this context, both in individual memory and through a vibrant vernacular historiography. This is a book that takes seriously not just the memories of its interlocutors, but their scholarship; their own endeavors in writing their history.
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Date
2025
volume
58
numéro
5
Titre abrégé
J Soc Hist
doi
10.1093/jsh/shaf069
issn
1527-1897
Langue
eng

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