Full Description
In The Genealogical Imagination Michael Jackson juxtaposes ethnographic and imaginative writing to explore intergenerational trauma and temporality. Drawing on over fifty years of fieldwork, Jackson recounts the 150-year history of a Sierra Leone family through its periods of prosperity and powerlessness, war and peace, jihad and migration. Jackson also offers a fictionalized narrative loosely based on his family history and fieldwork in northeastern Australia that traces how the trauma of wartime in one generation can reverberate into the next. In both stories Jackson reflects on different modes of being-in-time, demonstrating how genealogical time flows in stops and starts-linear at times, discontinuous at others-as current generations reckon with their relationships to their ancestors. Genealogy, Jackson demonstrates, becomes a powerful model for understanding our experience of being-in-the-world, as nobody can escape kinship and the pull of the past. Unconventional and evocative, The Genealogical Imagination offers a nuanced account of how lives are lived, while it pushes the bounds of the forms that scholarship can take.
Contents
Preamble 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
