Description
Book SynopsisTasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the Indian Ocean port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, showing how the built environment was central to how its residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries.
Trade Review“A landmark exploration of the built environment as a medium of social life, a register of history making, and a historical source. Set in a Malagasy city of migrants and stretching from the eighteenth century to the present, Tasha Rijke-Epstein’s
Children of the Soil resets the agenda for writing about the politics of mobility and belonging.” -- David L. Schoenbrun, author of * The Names of the Python: Belonging in East Africa, 900 to 1930 *
“A lucid and engaging history of the materiality of placemaking and belonging. This book charts decisively new, exceptionally rich terrain for urban studies and ethnographically informed architectural history.” -- Laura Fair, author of * Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania *
Table of ContentsNote on Toponyms ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Material Histories 1
I. Building Power
1. Casting the Land: Architectural Tactics and the Politics of Durability 27
2. Vibrant Matters: The
Rova and More-Than-Human Forces 54
II. Anticipatory Landscapes
3. Storied Refusals: Labor and Laden Absences 87
4. Sedimentary Bonds: Treasured Mosques and Everyday Expertise 123
III. Residual Lives and Afterlives
5. Garnered Presences: Constructing and Belonging in the
Zanatany City 161
6. Violent Remnants: Infrastructures of Possibility and Peril 195
Epilogue: Unfinished Histories 225
Notes 241
Bibliography 293
Index 339
