Professor Nathalie Arnold Koenings Publishes Book on Mysticism, History, and Politics on African Island

Arnold Keonings is professor of anthropology, literary arts and African studies, as well as dean of Decolonial and Global Studies and Transdisciplinary Social Inquiry, at Hampshire. Her new book was released in July.

For two centuries, Pemba, the second largest island of Zanzibar, has been known by East Africans and outsiders alike as rich in “dangerous knowledge.” Despite Pembans’s reputation for piety and deep Islamic understanding, uchawi — defined as “mystical work and power” or magic, witchcraft, or sorcery — has long featured in diverse ideas about their identity and worldly influence. Arnold Keoning investigates how today, as traditional methods of securing agency on this island are called into question and new ways proliferate, the mystical world is an intensely conflicted realm where the nature of power, ethical action, and reality itself is continually reframed.

The luminous ethnography follows changes in the invisible geographies of Pemba through the greatest transformations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, the adoption of multiparty democracy, the rise of Islamic revival and reform, and intensifying neoliberalism. Through an exploration of rural imaginings of power, it argues that nations are made in and by their peripheries, which give “the center” shape. Highlighting the intersections of mystical practices, religion, and politics-as-such on the Swahili Coast, the book contributes new perspectives to studies of the imagination, power, and religious transformation in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the larger Islamic world.

Arnold Koenings is a multicultural thinker and a writer. All her courses, whether in writing, literature, or anthropology, center writing as a mode of reflection and a method of discovery. Her published work as a literary translator includes Tamasha, a novella by Naila Barwani (Dira, 2022), and shorter works of fiction and poetry by Mohammed Said Abdalla, Mohammed Ghassani, Adam Shafi, and Nassor Hilal Kharusi, which have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Five Points, Words without Borders, and The New Orleans Review. She publishes fiction as N.S. Koenings. Her novel, The Blue Taxi, and her short story collection, Theft, were published by Little Brown and Company in 2006 and 2009. Her short stories have appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, The Sangam House Reader, and The Enkare Review.