Book Discussion: "Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Madagascar" with Tasha Rijke-Epstein

Description

Come celebrate the release of Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar by Vanderbilt University historical ethnographer Tasha Rijke-Epstein. Rijke-Epstein will speak on her book with time for open discussion. A reception will follow.

In this urban history of port city Mahajanga, Rijke-Epstein "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 … [as] 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 devices through which they sought to build their presence into the landscape and transform themselves from outsiders into "children of the soil" (zanatany). In tracing the centrality of Mahajanga's architecture to everyday life, Rijke-Epstein offers new ways to understand the relationships between the material world, the more-than-human realm, and the making of urban life."

This event is part of the Madagascar Workshop annual conference, co-sponsored by:

• the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute
• the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine
• the departments of Anthropology, History of Medicine, and Modern Languages and Literatures
• the Medicine, Science, Humanities program