Description
Book SynopsisMichael Jackson juxtaposes ethnographic and imaginative writing to explore intergenerational trauma and temporality, showing how genealogy becomes a powerful model for understanding our experience of being in the world.
Trade Review“Michael Jackson has long been a source of inspiration for those of us interested in pushing the boundaries of anthropological writing, providing us with regular and often much-needed reminders of the high ethical stakes of such writerly experimentation.
The Genealogical Imagination will be of immense interest to anthropologists, literary scholars, students and teachers of creative writing, and anyone interested in the expressive possibilities of writing as a means of exploring the ways in which humans exist in time.” -- Stuart McLean, author of * Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human *
“I already have the sense that
The Genealogical Imagination will not leave me alone in the years to come—that I will be haunted by it and worked upon by it in the way I am worked over by the stories of my own forebears.
The Genealogical Imagination is an anthropological tour de force. It will inhabit the imagination of generations of anthropologists to come.” -- Lisa Stevenson, author of * Life beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic *
Table of ContentsPreamble 1
Chronicles of the Barawa Marah
Being-in-Time 7
Being of Two Minds 13
Koinadugu 23
Jihad and Colonization 33
Albitaiya 36
Primus inter Pares 41
Lifelines and Lineages 45
Prospero and Caliban 51
Tina Komé 56
Abdul's Reminiscences 63
Limitrophes 71
Noah's Story 78
Taking Stock 89
Ferensola 95
S. B.'s Story 99
After the War 107
Within These Four Walls 111
Passages 119
Relationship and Relativity 122
Endings 135
Only Connect 152
Transition 156
Fathers and Sons
Part 1
Black Mountain 167
Clearing Out the Garage 174
A Hidden History 188
New Lives for Old 191
Billy 206
The Wet 208
Part II
Aground on the Great Barrier 219
University 223
Maya 232
Families 237
Breaking Point 241
Part III
The Unanimous Night 253
Weary Bay 259
Bulbul 267
Toby 270
The Reef 281
The Return 285
Postscript 288
Notes 293
Index to Chronicles of the Barawa Marah 305
