Under My Skin: Table of Contents And Chapter Abstracts For A Proposed Book, March 19. 2020
Table of Contents
Chapter 01.
Mass Violence, Colonial Memories, and The Butterfly Effect, 1972-1974
Charting Emerging Positionalities
MAGIC, Pringle and Chasing Liberation Ephemera
The End of The Empire, and Geoffrey Barraclough
Christopher Hill and Historical Omniscience
Chapter 02.
The Silence of Liberation Ephemera, 1974-1977
Teleology, Memes, and Liberation Ephemera
Geoffrey Best, War Studies, and Hagiography.
An Intense Love Affair and Rajiv Guha’s Subaltern Narratives.
Chapter 03.
Wiriyamu Abandoned, 1977-1981
Hasting, the Church Archives, and Montaillou
Oral History, The First Two Guinea Pigs: Boddell and Turner
Civil War, Stateless, and a New Positionality
Wiriyamu Abandoned
“Don’t Be Silly,” said Valerie, “Finish the thesis.”
Chapter 04.
Interviews With Priests and Maputo Liberators, 1994-1995
The Flight And Father Joseph
Padre Berenguer and The Failed Interview
Miguel Buendia and General Hama Thai
“O Monhe Esta Aqui," said an ex-Frelimo fighter!
Jesuit Reticence and Combonian Views
Chapter 05.
Informants and Survivor Testimonies, 1994-1995
Tete’s First Four Respondents
The Nightmare, relived, recounted, reconstructed
Respite and Reengagement in Fieldwork
Chapter 06.
Voice-Digging Catholics, Journalists and A Killer, 1995-2015
Meetings with remarkable men in Madrid
Sangalo’s Sanitarium
The Killer In Sines
Hastings In Leeds, Journalists and Catholics in London
Pringle Redux
Chapter 07.
The Trauma of Unintended Consequences, 1996-2008
Data Losses and Evidence Processing
Vicarious Trauma, And The Voices of The “Mphondorho”
Towards A New Approach to Forensic Historiography
Chapter 08.
Writing Voices That Refused To Die, 2009-2020
The First Struggle Against Epistemic Erasure
Scholars and Subaltern Allies Speak Out
Seating Wiriyamu In The annals of Colonial History
Montaillou, Magomero, and Wiriyamu before the fall
Sharing Survivor Stories
Historians And This Text
Dawood, The Father and Dawood The Son!
Conclusion
Epilogue:
Confronting Salazar’s Silence
Works Cited
Index
Brief Chapter Abstracts
Chapter 01.
Mass Violence, Colonial Memories, and The Butterfly Effect, 1972-1974
The chapter discusses Wiriyamu and its impact on the author, who was then wrestling with key concepts on the nature of history. Reflections on the revelation and the key concepts, resulted in a forty-year data-hunt to reconstruct the anatomy of the massacre.
Chapter 02.
The Silence of Liberation Ephemera, 1974-1977
This chapter tackles the means used to collect ephemera and published records, methods used to process these and then analyze the resultant data, which proved too poor to shed light on the massacre and the war surrounding it, which in turn led the project to search elsewhere for records on the carnage.
Chapter 03.
Wiriyamu Abandoned, 1977-1981
The chapter invites readers to follow events that brought the project to an abrupt end. These events began with the author’s training in oral history for data-mining trauma-centric mass violence, the dry-runs devised to iron out kinks in interviewing respondents under fieldwork conditions, and the subsequent changes put in place following readings of Braudelian micro-history, which culminated in a complex set of personal, professional and political factors terminating the project.
Chapter 04.
Interviews With Priests and Maputo Liberators, 1994-1995
As the title suggests, this chapter is devoted to phase one of the projects, interviewing priests and guerrilla commanders who played a central role in the Wiriyamu story. The text pays particular attention to factors influencing the interviewing process, including the author’s mental cartography that at times impaired the interviewing process.
Chapter 05.
Informants and Survivor Testimonies, 1994-1995
This portion of the monograph concentrates on two aspects of the project: data-collection on the forensic reconstruction of the massacre as a lived experience; and recording survivor memories as a shared experience designed to give granular texture to the day-long ordeal that decimated the triangle on that day, 16 December 1972.
Chapter 06.
Voice-Digging Catholics, Journalists, and A Killer, 1995-2015
This chapter should prove dramatic to read. It documents steps taken to “snag” an interview with a Catholic priest central to the story, which was held in a sanitarium in a rooftop garden adjacent to a pigeon coop. It presaged an equally eventful set of encounters, first with the killer leading the carnage at Wiriyamu. Similar interviews then followed with priests and journalists in Leeds, London, and New York. The tail end of the chapter lays out the careful strategy put in place to minimize pitfalls that festered earlier interviews in Maputo and Tete.
Chapter 07.
The Trauma of Unintended Consequences, 1996-2008
This portion of the book records two types of data losses, oral and written; and the effects of continued exposure to survivor narratives on the author’s mental health and those around him. Particular attention is paid to share transparently measures put in place to mitigate data losses and address the concomitant mental health issues, which ultimately resuscitated the project bringing it to a successful conclusion.
Chapter 08.
Writing Voices That Refused To Die, 2009-2020
The chapter lays out the trajectory of writing the Wiriyamu trilogy, each crafted for a specific purpose, one to refute denial of the massacre as a significant event in Portuguese colonial history, one to share the voices of the unheard survivors and witnesses, and one to reveal the anatomy of a forensic historian at work.
Conclusion
Epilogue:
Confronting Salazar’s Silence
A small text ensues here documenting my visit to Salazar’s office whence he crafted the various imperial acts affecting the colonized in Africa. The interrogatories I carried with me failed to yield responses from that office that ruled the empire for nearly half a century, leading me to depart empty-handed.
Works Cited
Index
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