Ethiopia: Modern Nation – Ancient Roots

Ethiopia: Modern Nation – Ancient Roots examines Ethiopia’s unique place in African and global history, offering new insights into its cultural and political identity. Edited by Dagmawi Woubshet (University of Pennsylvania), Elizabeth W. Giorgis, and Surafel Wondimu Abebe (The Africa Institute, Sharjah)—who also co-convened The Africa Institute’s inaugural Country-Focused Season on Ethiopia (2019–2020)—the book is structured into five parts. It covers themes of exceptionalism, Black diasporic imagination, historical shifts, migration and exile, and Ethiopia’s literary, visual, and performing arts.

Published by iwalewabooks in collaboration with The Africa Institute (GSU), Sharjah, this book adds a significant voice to contemporary African studies. iwalewabooks, based in Johannesburg, Lagos, and Frankfurt, is renowned for its work with cultural workers, artists, and academics, particularly from the Global South.

About the Book

There is much in Ethiopia’s cultural and political identity that contemporary audiences will find inspiring. For instance, while the colonial thesis argues that Africa is singularity the invention of European colonialism, the non-colonial thesis in Ethiopian scholarship sees Ethiopia through the lens of exceptionalism, that Ethiopia, which was never colonized, is in rather than of Africa. If African modernity and modernism are intimately linked with colonialism, certainly Ethiopia’s inimitable historical condition merits fresh lines of inquiry to understand how Ethiopian negotiated their “independent” status quo through and against colonial arrangements that shaped the historical, cultural, and material realities of their African counterparts. One of this book’s central contributions is, therefore, its conceptualization of how Ethiopia’s singular colonial history can be analyzed in relation to the political thought that shaped African colonial history. Ethiopia’s supposed singularity, as it particularly pertains to its modern history, cannot be conceived outside the broader colonial legacy and the complexity of meaning and making.

About the Editors

*All editors were also co-convenors of the Country-Focused Season, Ethiopia: Modern Nation – Ancient Roots (2019-2020)

Dagmawi Woubshet, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Woubshet is a scholar, writer, and translator, working at the intersection of African American, and African studies. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2017 as Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Associate Professor of English, Woubshet taught at Cornell University where he was named one of “The 10 Best Professors at Cornell.” Read more.

Elizabeth W. Giorgis, Chair, Department of Humanities and Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, The Africa Institute (GSU), Sharjah. She is a recipient of several fellowships including the Ali Mazrui Senior Fellowship for Global African Studies at The Africa Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Brown University, a Visiting Professor at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, and a fellow at the Rockefeller Bellagio Center Resident Fellows Program in Italy. Her book, “Modernist Art in Ethiopia” (2019, Ohio University Press), stands as the first comprehensive monographic study of Ethiopian visual modernism, situated within a broader social and intellectual context. Read more.

Surafel Wondimu Abebe, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and Theory, The Africa Institute (GSU), Sharjah. Abebe uses academia, performance, and media as sites of cultural politics from which to interrogate representational practices. Abebe engages with sedimented embodied historiographies in order to understand what it means to be human in the here and now. Read more.

*Available for purchase at Meroë, The Africa Institute’s bookshop (on campus) and online via iwalewabooks.