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3 Introduction ALTERNATIVE VISIONS In June 1993, I returned to Madagascar following an absence of six and a half years, and by the end of my first day back, my head was swimming. The recent shift from isolationist socialism to open market trade was evident everywhere in the central highland capital of Antananarivo. The streets were choked with new cars and trucks, many of them pricey all-terrain vehicles, including the one my friends had borrowed in order to pick me up at the airport. Colorful billboards lined our route, some with three-dimensional frames capable of automatically displaying a repetitive series of images. For an instant, I thought I was in the French countryside. As we reached the outskirts of town, the air seemed terribly polluted, the car fumes burning my eyes, nose, and throat. The neighborhood where I regularly stay was full of new construction projects, yet it also swarmed with more katramy (the homeless ) than I remembered. This was not the island nation I remembered from 1987, and I found myself staring out the car window in wonder. By the end of the day, I was exhausted. I had arrived at 6:00 A.M., after nearly twenty hours of flying; followed by a full day of carousing with old friends and surrogate kin, I was so tired I could hardly stand. Around 7:00 P.M., a group of us sat down in the family parlor in order to watch television before dinner, as had sometimes been our habit when I had lived here before. I settled into a comfy armchair, hoping to take a brief nap before we reassembled at the table. I had anticipated either a stilted presentation of the national news or a boring and sappy historic drama imported from Brazil, a soap-opera-style program aired over the course of many nights, the characters’ lives hopelessly entangled and plagued by unrequited love, infidelity, greed, treachery, and murder. In 1987, there had been only one, government-controlled television station in Madagascar, and the programming was predictable, with shows sometimes running uninterrupted for hours at a stretch. By 1993, however, national television had clearly undergone radical changes, as I soon realized as I watched the screen. For one, there was talk of more than one station. Furthermore, and much to my surprise, the broadcast opened with a series of ads for items that were of foreign origin yet produced locally on the island. The most memorable involved a scenario intimately familiar to all inhabitants of Madagascar: a group of strangers traveling together suddenly find themselves stranded, their van having broken down on an unpaved rural road. Everyone piles out to await repairs. The driver searches for a pen to jot down some notes, and a passenger reaches into his pocket for a brand-new BiC® pen. Another man, realizing they may be stuck there for a long time, rummages through in his travel bag until he finds what he’s looking for: his BiC® razor, with which he begins nonchalantly to shave, without soap and water. Meanwhile, the transport’s crew have discovered a flat tire. They open the back of the van and unearth a brand-new spare, still encased in its yellow factory wrapping. They strip this from the tire and toss it on the ground, so that we viewers can read the label—the tire, too, is a BiC® product. By the end of the commercial, the room is in an uproar of laughter. “What has happened to Malagasy TV?” I later asked a young friend. “Ahh, Lisy! This is [President Zafy’s] Third Republic,” she responded. “We young people don’t listen to the radio any more—it’s old-fashioned, it’s not cool.”1 “But why?” “Because we have nothing else to do! . . . You know, the politicians and journalists , they call us la génération sacrifiée—we are Madagascar’s ‘sacrificed generation.’ ” La génération sacrifiée, “the sacrificed generation”: I would hear this phrase repeatedly throughout the next three years of research as I probed the experiences of Madagascar’s educated youth. Students of a range of ages were regularly described by adults as “sacrificed,” “massacred,” “forgotten,” and “neglected,” their current lives judged emblematic of a comprehensive political experiment gone awry. Frequently , too, such critiques were laced with adult fears of the corrupting nature of mass media of foreign—and especially, Western—origins. More specifically, these powerful terms were...

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