ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This study reimagines Zanzibari coastal consciousness as an exemplar of transmodernity by examining refugee issues in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea, critically investigating the nexus between nation-states and racism. It reconceptualizes the refugee crisis by tracing the history of Zanzibar's distinctive littoral society, the entanglement of racism and nationalism inherited from colonial rule, and the traumatic modern history silenced under the paradigm of the nation-state. Drawing on Balibar's analysis of racism and nationalism as mutually constitutive forces, the study interrogates how nationalism─a central to the formation of nation-states─operates within colonial history and generates the mechanisms producing refugees, as well as the internal logics that trigger racism and nationalism in chain reactions. Zanzibar's geographical location and long trade history cultivated ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse cultures, exemplifying Indian Ocean coastal consciousness that provides critical perspectives for historicizing contemporary migration and refugee issues. Successive colonial regimes—from Omani and British Empires through the Cold War—entrenched deep-rooted racism, and its aftermath of the 1964 Zanzibar nationalist Revolution further solidified European nation-state boundaries while deepening Zanzibar's internal divisions under nationalism. By identifying racism and nationalism as persistent structures of domination throughout colonization and postcolonial crises, this study historicizes the already-racialized refugee condition and implicates Britain, the former colonial metropole, in the tragedy of Zanzibari exiles. This also reveals refugee discourse's complicity with European national identity. Against this backdrop, Indian Ocean coastal consciousness emerges as a transmodern attempt to recover transnational networks' history and culture. Reading By the Sea as imagining migration beyond nation-state demarcations, this study recontextualizes the concept of refugees.

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