Resumen de Diasporic Circularities: Omani-Zanzibaris Narrate Experiences in and Out of the Archipelago, 1964
The experience of the Omani-Zanzibaris who were forced to migrate from Zanzibar to Oman in 1964 has received relatively little attention, particularly as seen from the arriving/returning Omani-Zanzibaris’ emic perspectives. As we will see in this chapter, Oman’s identity as a cosmopolitan empire offers a variety of pathways for understanding its present-day culture and politics, as well as its responses to the large wave of arrivals from postcolonial Zanzibar. The chapter seeks to arrive at a better understanding of the forced migrations by telling the story of this period from the theoretical stance of hybridity, which challenges the prevailing essentialism of the historical narratives of the 1964 events as an African uprising against Omani colonizers. To expound the experiences of Omani-Zanzibaris, this project gathered multiple accounts drawn from multi-sited ethnographic research carried out in the first round of fieldwork in Oman and Zanzibar together with extensive conversations held in Zanzibar and Muscat in 2016 and 2017. Life-history collections, memoirs (both published and in private family possession in Arabic, English, and Swahili), archival materials in London and Muscat, and digital sources were also researched.
