LITMIR.BIZ

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an attempt to describe a disparate group of people with common origins and common practices. It is a sort of ethnographic biography of an experience.

      Commenting on Michael Lambek’s essay on remembering as moral practice, Maurice Bloch observes that there are instances where “questions of individual memory are developed by means of a public idiom and conversely the memory burdens of individuals contribute to the reproduction of that idiom and its ability to continue to commemorate the past [in Madagascar].”¹⁹ This description could also describe others’ cultural practices, such as those whose stories are in this volume. Their family narratives seem to be about, and used by, a network of families and are in fact sustained by such networks. In fact, the stories defy biological logic. They supersede the intricate mathematics of subdivision in genetic histories. If such beliefs are not based on the force of physical proof or on the evidence of an essentialist self-view of purity, what is the logic of their persistence? Do these narratives also have some moral functions? The answer to these questions is the main theme of this book.

       Ethnographies and History

      The work of memory is not the same as the work of history, for memory follows its own purposes and logic, focusing on selected events and discarding others. Memory exists in a fluctuating personal dialogue between what was and what is. Consciously or unconsciously, a story may be changed according to the narrator’s relation to the past or to the present. The work of history, on the other hand, is consciously intentional. It represents a concerted effort to bring together different kinds of material evidence to demonstrate that an event, or series of events, occurred. In writing on the subject of African American family stories about ancestors from Madagascar, I have sought to engage the thorny issue of the oral narrative as memory and as history. As I suggest earlier, this volume is characterized by the tension that exists between the oral historical narrative, on the one hand, and written histories and the archive, on the other. This book necessarily employs an interdisciplinary approach, using history and ethnography, to look at family oral narratives in a historical context.

      My intention has not been to write a history of early Malagasy arrivals in the United States but rather to present diverse stories together in historical context and to fashion a picture of the larger story that this assembly creates. The discussion in this volume, thus, is not based on past quotes from written slave narratives and autobiographies (although a few will be included) but on contemporary claims, collected over the last two decades, to Malagasy descent among African American families. Their stories are often frustratingly shallow and lacking in detail and description. Yet, the bare quality of these testimonies is itself a marker of the conditions under which the stories originated and were passed down. The silences speak loudly of the limited social space and time that was available for first-generation descendants to learn about the country of their mothers or fathers.

      As the narratives themselves show, their recollection and performance is a practice that continually enhances family solidarity and, thus, individual rootedness. The pronounced interiorality of these performances (limited to home and family) underlines their value as a source of joy and wonder that should be protected. The wonder is that the ancestor survived to tell the tale; the joy is that the current generation works at the survival of the tale itself and thereby on the continued commemoration of the ancestor. Their stories serve as both history and entertainment because the story finishes in the present generation, to be later embellished and modified by coming generations. The profane of today becomes the sacred of tomorrow.

      Global history is the not the only form suitable for recounting the past in a globalized world, and as Natalie Zemon Davis has stated, “local storytelling” may serve a global program toward decentering the mainstream historical narrative.²⁰ By tracing a series of local stories about Madagascar and using primary sources, I demonstrate that first-person testimonies and other historical accounts can be employed to expand the view of a local situation to its global causes.²¹ In this way the reader’s attention can be drawn to the potential that local histories of slaves can bring to understanding early modern global dynamics.²² These considerations are primary concerns addressed in this volume: how local stories lead to global histories and how ethnography can complement and stimulate new perspectives of and questions regarding the historiographic project.

      Historic research has contributed a great deal to furthering our understanding of slave communities in the Americas. Earlier ethnographic overemphasis on “remaining” or “surviving” cultural traits among slave descendants probably led to the failure among earlier scholars to read instances of the dynamic creolization and hybridization processes that took place from the seventeenth through the eighteenth centuries, which entailed various African responses to plantation and urban culture in colonial America.²³ Searches for “Yoruba culture” or “Wolof practices” have in some ways prevented us from seeing the nuances that actually tell a far more succinct story. However limited they may have been, early ethnographic studies of New World African diaspora communities were, however, critical in drawing scholarly attention to the presence of a rich field of inquiry that had previously been obfuscated by racism in and out of the academy.

      Early on, sociological and anthropological studies of African American communities in North America argued that discernible evidence of particular “national” cultural traits or ethnic affiliations were no longer in evidence by the time of emancipation. This view was particularly true of the African American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who argued that no discernible, particularly African-derived behaviors existed, and that “American Negroes” by and large practiced a culture that was a successful synthesis of African and European cultures, with an overwhelming prevalence of western European culture.²⁴ The anthropologist Melville Herskovits disagreed and argued that even though no direct evidence of specific African cultures or ethnic groups was present, an aggregate African-derived culture had resulted from the importation of slaves from various parts of the continent, and this aggregate presented what could be considered a New World African cultural dynamic based on African-originated practices in religion, the arts, and family structure.²⁵ In the 1970s, anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price introduced a more dynamic model. They stressed the amalgamation of various African influences and the invention of a new Atlantic Afro-American culture, which, by virtue of the conditions of its development in various slave societies, had some discernible African traits that could be identified, but in new forms of expression.²⁶

      Beyond the African creolization and African hybridized cultural core discussed by Mintz and Price, both respectively and together, lies a territory that is increasingly being explored and illuminated through research in African history and the transatlantic slave trade.²⁷ The recent burst of intellectual productivity of Africanist and Americanist historians has shown that for any given slave environment a continuum of more or less African continental cultural expression could be found, due to the constant arrival of new slaves, which continued in some places up to the mid-nineteenth century. Scholars have recently demonstrated that chronology, geography, and demographics have everything to do with what cultural syncretizations or borrowings did or did not take place in New World African diaspora communities.²⁸ The present volume draws on this perspective of ethnic and identity transformation over time as impacted by such factors as geography and settlement patterns.

      Specific information on points of embarkation and arrival has allowed new perspectives and greater understanding of the formation of the African diaspora communities of the Atlantic. We now know that trade and credit networks affected who went where and thus had much to do with the sorts of African cultural practice and cultural negotiation that took place in any given American site.²⁹ Recent scholarly work argues for close attention to the dynamic and synergetic nature of slave identities in the New World.³⁰ Increased research on New World slave cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has revealed that not only regional differences and differences in plantation regime but also differences of management style and local social practices among planters had much to do with the evolving character of slave communities.³¹ For example, Robert “King” Carter in colonial Virginia had the tendency to purchase and settle “lots” of slaves led to cultural clusters of slaves from common or proximate cultural origins.³²

      Paying attention to local narrative

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