Description
Book SynopsisIn
Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. From Mahajanga’s hilltop palace to the alluvial depths of its cesspools, the city’s spaces were domains for ideological debates between rulers and subjects, French colonizers and indigenous Malagasy peoples, and Comorian migrants and Indian traders. In these spaces, Mahajanga’s residents expressed competing moral theories about power over people and the land. The built world was also where varying populations reckoned with human, ancestral, and ecological pasts and laid present and future claims to urban belonging. Migrants from nearby Comoros harnessed built forms as anticipatory de
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
