Narrative representations of revolutionary Zanzibar

Increasingly, geographers use literature and popular culture to interpret the ways in which historical events are represented and remembered. One goal of this usage of literature is the expansion of the prevailing scholarly imagination beyond western scripts to appreciate the nuances of interpretation which accompany any major world event. Here, I develop a cultural materialist study of narratives of Zanzibar's 1964 Revolution with a focus on accounts originating in Tanzania. These representations of history are assessed as dominant, residual, emergent and excluded accounts in a contest for cultural hegemony, emphasizing themes of place description and racial identity. Storytelling about Zanzibar's revolution evidences the layers of meaning in representations of history and highlights the shifting power dynamics and historical geography of cultural narratives. Such a multi-layered analysis is necessary because the revolution narrative is not an idle memory or an uncontested tale. It is at the core of many Zanzibaris» political identity. Zanzibar represents a microcosm of many of the world's most pressing social and geopolitical concerns, providing a valuable lesson in the intricacies of imagined communities and the imagined histories which accompany them.