Literacy and Power in Madagascar

Co-hosted with CISA

In this article, I seek to deepen the chronology and broaden the scope of literary histories of Indian Ocean Africa by examining the evolving and at times unstable literary mosaic of highland Madagascar between 1820 and 1860.  Because those who employed elements of the literate bundle were impelled into positions of social influence or marginalized from it, understanding Madagascar’s literary mosaic with its many distant and insular interconnections is especially useful for thinking about contests over power there, especially in and around the court at Antananarivo, and hypothesizing how literacy may enter into sociopolitical struggles and literary landscapes elsewhere in Africa.