The Genealogical Imagination

In <i>The Genealogical Imagination</i> 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 northeastern 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 pull of the past. Unconventional and evocative <i>The Genealogical Imagination</i> offers a nuanced account of how lives are lived while it pushes the bounds of the forms that scholarship can take.