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

Abstract

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 cultural roots. This article focuses on the contradictions that unfold from these divergent spatial imaginaries, arguing that images of cultural connection or seamless flows mirror theoretical flaws in transnational studies more broadly.