The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar

Front Cover
University of California Press, Sep 3, 2002 - Education - 377 pages
Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this provocative study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. Lesley Sharp refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action.

She insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. Sharp asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar.

Keywords: Critical pedagogy
 

Contents

Introduction
3
Historical and Political Considerations
9
Methodological Conundrums
21
Youth and the Colonized Mind
29
The Sacrificed Generation
77
The Life and Hard Times of the School Migrant
114
FREEDOM LABOR AND LOYALTY
153
Our Grandfathers Went to War
176
The Social Worth of Children 232
252
Youth in an Age of Nationalism
273
Future Desires
280
POPULATION FIGURES FOR MADAGASCAR 19001994
293
ENROLLMENT FIGURES FOR SELECT AMBANJA SCHOOLS
303
STUDENTS ASPIRATIONS
319
GLOSSARY
347
REFERENCES
353

Laboring for the Colony 105
195
Girls and Sex and Other Urban Diversions 299
223

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2002)

Lesley A. Sharp is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and author of The Possessed and the Dispossessed: Spirits, Identity, and Power in a Madagascar Migrant Town (California, 1993).

Bibliographic information