Diaspora without Homeland: Slave Descendants and the Cultural Politics of Ancestry in the Upper Gambia River Valley
This article investigates how memories of migration are used to maintain the status boundary between people of freeborn and slave descent in the Gambia. Based on ethnographic and historical research among the Soninke communities of the Upper River Region, the article shows that forgetting the roots...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/remi, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Revue européenne des migrations internationales
2013
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| الموضوعات: | |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | This article investigates how memories of migration are used to maintain the status boundary between people of freeborn and slave descent in the Gambia. Based on ethnographic and historical research among the Soninke communities of the Upper River Region, the article shows that forgetting the roots and routes of slave descendants has been central to forging and remembering their servile status. While all villagers have foreign origins, slave descendants are stigmatized for lacking certified ancestry. Unlike the freeborn, they cannot inscribe their homelands and diasporic journeys in the local oral traditions and genealogies of immigration. By drawing on the case study of a family, the article also shows that slave descendants may dispute this collective amnesia and discusses the possibilities and limits of subaltern narratives vis-à-vis the hegemonic production of the past. |
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