In this article, I look at “imperial formations” rather than at empire per se to register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation. Imperial formations are relations of force, harboring political forms that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights. Working with the concept of imperial formation, rather than empire per se, the emphasis shifts from fixed forms of sovereignty and its denials to gradated forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule—sliding and contested scales of differential rights. Imperial formations are defined by racialized relations of allocations and appropriations. Unlike empires, they are processes of becoming, not fixed things. Not least they are states of deferral that mete out promissory notes that are not exceptions to their operation but constitutive of them: imperial guardianship, trusteeships, delayed autonomy, temporary intervention, conditional tutelage, military takeover in the name of humanitarian works, violent intervention in the name of human rights, and security measures in the name of peace.

Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination

Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

It is hard to imagine tourism without the creative use of seductive as well as restrictive imaginaries about peoples and places. This article presents a conceptual framework for the study of tourism imaginaries and their diffusion. Where do such imaginaries originate, how and why are they circulated across the globe, and what kind of impact do they have on people’s lives? I discuss the multiple links between tourism and imagination, illustrating the overlapping but conflicting ways in which imaginings and fantasies drive tourists and tourism service providers alike. By applying this conceptual approach to international tourism in developing countries, I illustrate how the critical analysis of imaginaries offers a powerful deconstruction device of ideological, political, and sociocultural stereotypes and cliche´s.

Tourism Imaginaries: A Conceptual Approach

specialist texts addressing these subjects. Subjects include those found on any mainstream undergraduate geography course such as cartography and environment; theoretical approaches such as post-structuralism, postmodernism and postcolonialism; and subjects found at the core of cultural geographies such as the body, sexuality, identity and heritage (although consumption is touched on in other sections, I was surprised there was no entry dedicated to this topic). An average undergraduate may use this book to guide them through the conceptually and theoretically rich and diverse field of cultural geography (even if they cannot define the field at the end, they should be able to explain why). A student who really engages with this collection, may find themselves engaged in some form of critical cultural geography for life.

Ordinary cities: between modernity and development

When contemporary Africans express nostalgia for the colonial past, how are we to make sense of such sentiments? Anthropologists have tended to ignore colonial nostalgia, reacting with dismissal or distaste. This article seeks to account for this avoidance, exploring nostalgia as a crucial source for anthropology and a constitutive feature of Western modernity. Nostalgic sentiments of loss and longing are shaped by specific cultural concerns and struggles; like other forms of memory practice, these desires must be engaged with in ethnographic terms and located within the changing contours of a contested social landscape. In urban Zanzibar, I argue that colonial nostalgia has emerged in a postrevolutionary context and is best understood as a diverse set of responses to neoliberal policies of urban restructuring.

Engaging Colonial Nostalgia

Acknowledgments Introduction: Landscapes of Power and Planning 1 Cosmopolitan Lives, Urbane Worlds: Space and Society in Zanzibar City 2 Uncertain States: Colonial Practices and the Ambiguities of Power 3 Colonial Cartographies: Struggling to Make Sense of Urban Space 4 Disease, Environment, and Social Engineering: Clearing Out and Cleaning Up the Colonial City 5 Development and the Dilemmas of Expertise 6 Failures of Implementation: Circularity and Secrecy in the Pursuit of Planning 7 Disorder by Design: Legal Confusion and Bureaucratic Chaos in Colonial Planning Conclusion: Reflections on Planning, Colonial Power, and Continuities in the Present Notes Bibliography Index

Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar

This article explores the continuing hold that colonial categories still exercise in contemporary constructions of African urbanism – even in the context of a city being profoundly transformed by globalizing forces and processes. Since the mid‐1980s, urban plans and programmes have advocated conserving Mji Mkongwe, Zanzibar as cultural property – a historic ‘asset’ or national ‘treasure’. Pressured by structural adjustment and external donors, the state has pursued a restoration strategy that entails opening the city to new flows of capital, selling off its stock of properties and promoting a new tourist economy. Paradoxically, the reconfiguration of property as private has been made possible by asserting its collective origins, as buildings have been classified as the material expressions of particular cultural groups, constructed as the heritage of bounded and essentialized wholes: Arab, Indian, African. In this transnational and cosmopolitan urban milieu, past discourses of anthropological culture and ...

Casting a long shadow: colonial categories, cultural identities, and cosmopolitan spaces in globalizing Africa

This essay seeks to historicize shifting views of colonial urbanism since the 1960s. Dualistic oppositions once dominated scholarly understandings of colonial cities, but more recently postcolonial visions of hybridity and indeterminacy have come to the fore. More than shifts in academic paradigms are at stake; indeed, such divergent discourses raise critical questions as to how we should interpret urban forms and processes more generally. Instead of championing either side, the author seeks to bring these ostensibly divergent perspectives together, arguing for a more integrated historical and analytic approach to urban landscapes. Rather than opposing colonial accounts and postcolonial narratives, materialism and discourse, social sciences and humanities, the real and the ideal, we need to articulate these frameworks in order to grasp the actual complexities of colonial urban dynamics. Analyzing flawed urban interventions in East Africa, the author shows how colonial dualities were often asserted but rar...

Between Fixity and Fantasy: Assessing the Spatial Impact of Colonial Urban Dualism

Coastal East Africa has been dramatically re-imagined in recent years. Popular culture and mass media have played a central role in sparking new visions of how Zanzibar in particular “connects” with the wider world. For more than a decade now, both the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) and the Sauti za Busara music festival have worked to resituate Zanzibar regionally and within a wider diasporic and transnational Indian Ocean milieu. Through the staging and promotion of these annual festivals, culture has become a key tool for development, linked to tourism, media networking, and the growth of culture industries. ZIFF and Busara attempt to refigure Zanzibar with regard to space and temporality, emphasising certain visions of history and collective identity that are anything but uncontested. In practice and performance, ZIFF and Busara invoke transnational continuities across the Indian Ocean world; pan-Africanism and continental solidarities; the black diaspora; regional connections; and local ...

William Cunningham Bissell

Papers

Engaging Colonial Nostalgia

Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar

Casting a long shadow: colonial categories, cultural identities, and cosmopolitan spaces in globalizing Africa

Between Fixity and Fantasy: Assessing the Spatial Impact of Colonial Urban Dualism

From dhow culture to the diaspora: ZIFF, film, and the framing of transnational imaginaries in the western Indian Ocean