In The Genealogical Imagination Michael Jackson juxtaposes ethnographic and imaginative writing to explore intergenerational trauma and temporality. Drawing on over fifty years of fieldwork, Jackson recounts the 150-year history of a Sierra Leone family through its periods of prosperity and powerlessness, war and peace, jihad and migration. Jackson also offers a fictionalized narrative loosely based on his family history and fieldwork in Northeast Australia that traces how the trauma of wartime in one generation can reverberate into the next. In both stories Jackson reflects on different modes of being-in-time, demonstrating how genealogical time flows in stops and starts-linear at times, discontinuous at others-as current generations reckon with their relationships to their ancestors. Genealogy, Jackson demonstrates, becomes a powerful model for understanding our experience of being in the world, as nobody can escape kinship and the gravitational pull of the past. Unconventional and evocative, The Genealogical Imagination offers a nuanced account of how lives are lived while pushing the bounds of the forms that scholarship can take.

Book Information
ISBN 9781478011934
Author Michael Jackson
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 152g