While doing fieldwork in a village in east Madagascar that had suffered both heavy settler colonialism and a bloody anticolonial rebellion, Jennifer Cole found herself confronted by a puzzle. People in the area had lived through almost a century of intrusive French colonial rule, but they appeared to have forgotten the colonial period in their daily lives. Then, during democratic elections in 1992-93, the terrifying memories came flooding back. Cole asks, How do once-colonized peoples remember the colonial period? Drawing on a fine-grained ethnography of the social practices of remembering and forgetting in one community, she develops a practice-based approach to social memory.

"The best book-length study of colonial memory available.... Cole provides a way out of the dichotomy in which memory is viewed as either individual or 'collective.' " - Rosalind Shaw, coeditor of Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism/ The Politics of Religious Synthesis; "A remarkably lucid and self-assured analysis of social memory.... The book is a pleasure to read." - Michael Lambek, author of Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte

Jennifer Cole is a cultural anthropologist and member of the Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago.