Reconsidering Trauma, Identity, and the African Diaspora: Enslavement and Historical Memory in Nineteenth-Century Highland Madagascar

Abstract

N our time, collective identities and memories of trauma are deeply intertwined. Most ethnic minorities anchor their collective identities in the remembrance of past and present victimization. Victims of social trauma and their descendants often engage in purposeful and explicit remembering as a form of empowerment and identity formation. Conversely, perpetrators and their descendants seek to obliterate and question the validity of such memories and thereby undermine the empowerment and the identities they generate. In no domain of the North Atlantic experience is this process more conspicuous than in the history of slavery and the slave trade, although it finds parallels in the Holocaust, Basque nationalism, the internment of persons of Japanese descent in U.S. concentration camps during the Second World War, the crystallization of Irish American identity, and the gay rights movement, among many others. The Second World War marked an important point of departure for this mode of imagining identity from experiences of trauma, although such a pattern of memory and identity has historical antecedents, as in Quebec, where the official motto Je me souviens (I remember) dates to the late nineteenth century, or in the case of Jewish experiences of persecution since Assyrian and Babylonian exile.1 Informed by this commonly accepted relationship between trauma and identity in the West, historians of identity in the African diaspora have emphasized how Africans and their descendants in the Americas forged a sense of community from and through the shared trauma of bondage and exploitation.2 This article questions the universality of the relationship between