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

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 children, for its key actors are not adults but school youth. Lesley Sharp refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustainable collective thought or action. She insists instead on their political agency.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations List of Tables Notes on the Text Acknowledgments I. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A CHILDREN'S HISTORY INTRODUCTION 1. YOUTH AND THE COLONIZED MIND II. THE PERPLEXITIES OF URBAN SCHOOLING: SACRIFICE, SUFFERING, AND SURVIVAL 2. THE SACRIFICED GENERATION 3. THE LIFE AND HARD TIMES OF THE SCHOOL MIGRANT III. FREEDOM, LABOR, AND LOYALTY 4. THE RESURGENCE OF ROYAL POWER 5. OUR GRANDFATHERS WENT TO WAR 6. LABORING FOR THE COLONY IV. YOUTH AND THE NATION: SCHOOLING AND ITS PERILS 7. GIRLS AND SEX AND OTHER URBAN DIVERSIONS 8. THE SOCIAL WORTH OF CHILDREN CONCLUSION: YOUTH IN AN AGE OF NATIONALISM Appendix 1. A Guide to Key Informants Appendix 2. Population Figures for Madagascar, 1990-1994 Appendix 3. Population Figures for the Sambirano Appendix 4. Schools in Ambanja and the Sambirano Valley Appendix 5. Enrollment Figures for Select Ambanja Schools Appendix 6. Bac Results at the State-Run Lycee Tsiaraso I, 1990-1994 Appendix 7. Students' Aspirations Notes Glossary References Index

About the Author :
Lesley A. Sharp is Assistant 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).

Review :
"This fascinating study, grounded in vivid depictions of local life, relates to larger questions about the postcolonial exercise of political and economic power, when ostensibly sovereign states such as Madagascar are so profoundly controlled by international organizations unattached to any particular state. Sharp asks how young people in these radically changing circumstances are taught and teach themselves to understand their past, present and future."-Gillian Feeley-Harnik, author of A Green Estate; "Sharp's work is in the best tradition of classic anthropology, extending the critiques of Fanon, Mannoni, Memmi, and Freire by examining the effects of the socialist revolution, the birth of Malagasy nationalism, and the imposition of a postcolonial pedagogy on the minds of the 'sacrificed generation.'...Her detailed ethnography...is superb."-Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of Death without Weeping