Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets Takoma welcomes Wendy Wilson-Fall to discuss her new book "Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic."
In her first book, Wilson-Fall, associate professor and program chair of the Africana Studies Program at Lafayette College, analyzes Madagascar’s slave trade in the context of the Atlantic rather than the usual Indian Ocean market, a fresh perspective that leads her to new understandings of how ethnicity and culture survive radical dislocations. Starting in the 17th century, thousands of slaves were brought from Madagascar to the New World. Comparing historical records with narratives passed through the many generations of the slaves’ descendants, Wilson-Fall reveals that the Malagasy have maintained a more stable ethnic identity than have other similar populations.
