Narratives and Moral Projects: Generational Memories of the Malagasy 1947 Rebellion

Abstract

This article develops an analysis of how different generations in both rural and urban areas of East Madagascar remember a violent anticolonial rebellion that took place in 1947 and places these memories in the context of various state regimes' efforts to create competing narrations of the events. I show how rural and urban elders, rural and urban youth, and former soldiers remember the 1947 rebellion in different, but overlapping, ways. Rather than viewing the overall pattern as a simple reflex of the particular narratives people use, I suggest that their memories are best viewed as a complex outcome of the ways in which people's "moral projects" shape their selection, use and interpretation of particular narratives, thereby accounting for the considerable heterogeneity in the ways 1947 is remembered. Such a reading attempts to move beyond the tendency within cultural historical studies to focus solely on narrative dynamics to a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between narrative and context in the making of memory.