The River, The Road, and The Rural–Urban Divide: A Postcolonial Moral Geography from Southeast Madagascar

Abstract

In this article, I analyze how ideas of attachment to place and the experience of political and economic marginality combine to produce a particular moral geography for people of the Manambondro region of southeast Madagascar. Though the elements of this moral geography comprise an archive of sorts of the colonial encounter, they also speak of people's consciousness of their marginality within the postcolonial present. I argue that moral geography represents a structure of feeling, a form of social consciousness that captures something profound about people's senses of place and also, regarding their ambivalence toward modernity, their sense of who they are and who they might become, [colonialism, modernity, moral geography, place, postcolonialism, structure of feeling, Madagascar]