Children of the Soil: The Politics of Built Forms, Labor, and Anticipatory Landscapes in Urban Madagascar

FAIN: FEL-273525-21

Tasha Katherine Rijke-Epstein
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

Writing of a book on the history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar from the 1750s to 1960, with a focus on the role of immigrants in shaping the urban landscape.

What kinds of worlds are imaginable, and made possible, through material construction of places? Drawing on thirty months of fieldwork and an eclectic archive of buildings as artifacts, documents, and oral accounts. Children of the Soil charts the new modes of collectivity and urban governance migrants brought about in Mahajanga, Madagascar between 1750s-1960, by looking at the enduring legacies of their labor—their homes, mosques, and built forms. This project argues that histories of urbanism are incomplete because they have ignored Africans’ creative building and design practices so critical to city life and offers new insights into how urban dwellers have drawn on earthly substances—mud, metal, thatch and stone—to manage political transitions and carve out new possibilities for life.

Associated Products

Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar (Book)
Title: Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar
Author: Tasha Rijke-Epstein
Abstract: Anchored in an Indian Ocean port city, this book weaves together an evocative history of the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents rewrote the past and managed the uncertainties of imperial encroachment, French colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. In Mahajanga, Madagascar, Sakalava royal leaders, highland Merina administrators, Indian traders, Comorian seafarers, French colonizers, and migrants from across the island transformed competing moral ideas about power over people, power over land, and power to define categories of belonging, into spirited reworkings of the land. From the hilltop palace to the alluvial depths of cesspools, the city’s spaces were domains for ideological debates between rulers and subjects, natives and newcomers, and the dead and the living, each possessing varying degrees of latitude to imprint their futuristic visions into the architectural tableau. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, Tasha Rijke-Epstein charts how migrants from nearby Comoros harnessed built forms as anticipatory devices through which they sought to build their presences into the landscape and transform themselves from outsiders into ‘children of the soil’ (zanatany). Yet, efforts to shape the future through material forms were powerfully subject to the nonhuman world of unruly spirits, enduring ancestors, lively substances, and ecological bounty. Children of the Soil foregrounds the knowledge, labor, and aspirations of the inhabitants of Mahajanga, for whom the material world was key to reckoning with human, ancestral, and ecological pasts and laying fragile claims to urban belonging. Stretching across early and postcolonial pasts, this book advances a novel perspective on buildings — as evidentiary sources, epistemic repositories, and affective mediums — and cities — as archival terrains — forged through struggles over inscription. Challenging disciplinary boundaries, Rijke-Epstein offers a fresh analytical
Year: 2023
Publisher: Duke University Press
Type: Single author monograph

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