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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Preamble
- Chronicles of the Barawa Marah
- Being-in-Time
- Being of Two Minds
- Koinadugu
- Jihad and Colonization
- Albitaiya
- Primus inter Pares
- Lifelines and Lineages
- Prospero and Caliban
- Tina Komé
- Abdul’s Reminiscences
- Limitrophes
- Noah’s Story
- Taking Stock
- Ferensola
- S. B.’s Story
- After the War
- Within These Four Walls
- Passages
- Relationship and Relativity
- Endings
- Only Connect
- Transition
- Fathers and Sons
- Part I
- Black Mountain
- Clearing Out the Garage
- A Hidden History
- New Lives for Old
- Billy
- The Wet
- Part II
- Aground on the Great Barrier
- University
- Maya
- Families
- Breaking Point
- Part III
- The Unanimous Night
- Weary Bay
- Bulbul
- Toby
- The Reef
- The Return
- Postscript
- Notes
- Index to Chronicles of the Barawa Marah
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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