Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar

Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the Indian Ocean port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, showing how the built environment was central to how its residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers anurban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before,during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival andethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlivesof built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperialencroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over twocenturies. From Mahajanga's hilltop palace to the alluvial depthsof its cesspools, the city's spaces were domains for ideologicaldebates between rulers and subjects, French colonizers andindigenous Malagasy peoples, and Comorian migrants and Indiantraders. In these spaces, Mahajanga's residents expressed competingmoral theories about power over people and the land. The builtworld was also where varying populations reckoned with human,ancestral, and ecological pasts and laid present and future claimsto urban belonging. Migrants from nearby Comoros harnessed builtforms as anticipatory devices through which they sought to buildtheir presence into the landscape and transform themselves fromoutsiders into "children of the soil" (zanatany). Intracing the centrality of Mahajanga's architecture to everydaylife, Rijke-Epstein offers new ways to understand the relationshipsbetween the material world, the more-than-human realm, and themaking of urban life Contents Note on Toponyms Acknowledgments Introduction: Material Histories Part I: Building Power 1. Casting the Land: Architectural Tactics and the Politics of Durability 2. Vibrant Matters: The Rova and More-Than- Human Forces Part II: Anticipatory Landscapes 3. Storied Refusals: Labor and Laden Absences 4. Sedimentary Bonds: Treasured Mosques and Everyday Expertise Part III: Residual Lives and Afterlives 5. Garnered Presences: Constructing Belonging in the Zanatany City 6. Violent Remnants: Infrastructures of Possibility and Peril Epilogue: Unfinished Histories Notes Bibliography Index