‘A Land That Fulfils Dreams’: Rethinking Zanzibar's Stone Town Beyond the Colonial Imaginary

The community of Stone Town, located ~25 kilometers off the coast of mainland Tanzania, is a site long burdened with colonial (and now postcolonial) fantasies that have positioned it for almost two hundred years as an exotic, consumable, Arab-Islamic locale. Thus, this chapter seeks to engage in a reparative analysis that moves Stone Town beyond its mythology as an imperialized fetish object towards occupying a more appropriate space as a site of active cultural resilience, continuity, and negotiation for current local stakeholders. Using Stone Town's structural landscape as evidence, this chapter positions Stone Town not only as a space of history and memory, but also a platform on which socio-political, cultural, and religious identities continue to be renovated and re-imagined in the contemporary period.

Keywords: architecture ; colonialism ; conservation ; coral ; cultural identity ; heritage ; Islam ; orientalism ; postcolonialism ; Stone Town ; tourism ; Zanzibar