ETHIOPIA: MODERN NATION – ANCIENT ROOTS
Scholarly Web Conference
Our international scholarly web conference, Ethiopia: Modern Nation – Ancient Roots, has now been successfully concluded.
We hope you had a chance to attend and appreciate some of the online sessions.
While we had the pleasure to host a diverse and engaged attendance throughout the conference, we learnt that some were not able to attend
sessions due to time difference. Therefore, we have requested permissions from scholars to make their presentations available on The Africa Institute’s YouTube channel.
In addition, the filmmakers have generously extended the screening time for films included in the program until Tuesday, 3 November.
We hope you take this opportunity to view and appreciate the research and films that have been presented in this conference.
Please refer to the link below:
https://bit.ly/3egL7Fk

Ethiopia: Modern Nation - Ancient
Roots calls for a range of interdisciplinary
scholars to consider issues of Ethiopian modernity within a national and
international context. In many areas including, but not limited to, Ethiopia’s
image as a sovereign black nation influenced and came to dominate debates on
movements that ranged from Pan-Africanism to Afrocentrism in the twentieth
century. The conference aims to bring forth a transnational epistemological
paradigm that can shed light on the current political, cultural and intellectual
complexities of Africa’s oldest independent nation-state.
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 singularly 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. Yet, Ethiopia has been a symbol of pride for black people in the African
continent and its global diaspora. As the late African American scholar William
Scott has stated, “By the last half of the previous century it had become a
mostly dead and dismissed doctrine, but the biblically based ideology of race
deliverance and destiny now known as Ethiopianism had inspired black people
belonging to Protestant faiths in parts of the African diaspora for almost 250
years.” Ethiopianism has a long history which Scott chronologically enumerated
as: Proto-Ethiopianism 1700–1800, Institutionalized Ethiopianism 1800–1830,
Classical Ethiopianism 1830–1865, Post-Emancipation Ethiopianism 1865–1915, New
Negro Ethiopianism 1915–1930, Messianic Ethiopianism 1930–1945 and Modern
Ethiopianism 1945–Present.
The late African American scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois had taken a keen interest in
developing a productive relationship between Ethiopians and African Americans as
Ethiopia represented for him the desire for decolonization and Pan- Africanist
consciousness. By integrating the history of the Nile Valley civilizations into
the Ethiopian past, Du Bois had attempted to incorporate Ethiopia into the
broader field of Black/Africana studies. Most importantly, DuBois did not have
an esoteric reading of the historical relations that took place in the Nile
Valley. Rather, he posits the Nile Valley as, what Fikru Gebrekidan calls,
“civilizational crossroads.” DuBois writes the following in 1915: “The
intercourse of Africa with Arabia and other parts of Asia has been so close and
long- continued that it is impossible to-day to disentangle the blood
relationships.” Unfortunately, the field of Ethiopian studies did not live up to
Du Bois’ vision of Black/Africana studies and modern historians have cut the
history of the Nile Valley away from the history of Africa dismissing any
connection between the two.
As much as it helps to debunk Eurocentric assumptions that places
Ethiopia/Africa in the zone of passivity and to relocate Ethiopian studies in
black studies, the DuBoisian perspective, particularly the earlier parlance, can
serve as a mode of thinking to study Ethiopia as a crossroad that accounts for
its peoples’ historical material relations with the rest of Africa, the black
diaspora, the Arab world, and Asia, notwithstanding their vexed relation with
the West.
Indeed, the process by which Ethiopian political identity became intertwined
with the political identity of continental Africa was spearheaded by Emperor
Haile Selassie, and a handful of Ethiopian diplomats who acclimated Ethiopia’s
educated classes with Pan-African consciousness and ideology. However, even with
the establishment of the Organization of the African Unity (OAU)– currently
known as The African Union (AU)– in 1963 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s transcendent
and temporal relationship to people of African descent was and continues to be
ambiguous. Most importantly, assumptions about Ethiopia as a nation and with
distinct identity continue to operate within an insular statist historiography
that engages history and culture without the theoretically eclectic and
interdisciplinary currents of colonial studies. This perspective has not only
sterilized intellectual discussions and research but also impoverished political
practice.
The absence of a Pan-Africanist vision and a presence of a colonial political
domination have indeed complicated the Ethiopian quest for a modern postcolonial
identity. Still the tumultuous political history of Ethiopia in the 20th and
21st centuries has also produced knowledge that speaks, albeit obliquely, to the
historical, political and ethical problems of the effects of colonialism. For
instance, in visual arts and literature contemporary artists and writers have
inspired as well as mobilized vigorous inquiries into the lives and experiences
of Ethiopians as products of complex histories of power relations. Their concern
about the urban revolution that has affected millions of lives, for example,
questions Ethiopian urbanism’s strategy of privilege and exclusion, as well as
its long-term implications. The works of Michael Tsegaye, Helen Zeru and Berhanu
Ashagrie, as well as writers like Bewketu Seyoum and Shimelis Bonsa, among many
contemporary artists and writers, feature forms of dominance and exclusion in
the context of urbanism. Certainly these types of political concerns have also
resonated among musicians and performers generating an important resource to
critiques of inequalities and to call of equality and social justice.
In the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, Ethiopians have also
experienced an unprecedented level of migration and have created new diasporas
that have shaped how Ethiopians at home and abroad have imagined themselves and
forged new identifications. Ethiopians now have large diasporic communities in
North America, Europe, in addition to a sizable population in the Horn of Africa
and the Middle East, a population that is contending with pressing contemporary
questions of migration, race, and citizenship. Concerns arose in relations to
such condition have influenced the work of diaspora Ethiopian artists such as
novelists Dinaw Mengestu, Maaza Mengiste or filmmakers such as Haile Gerima and
Yemane Demissie, who have provided us with narratives that put in relief the
record number of Ethiopians who have left their country in the last half
century. This new body of work opens up a critical space to think through
questions of diaspora from the vantage of Ethiopian studies, and to think about
the Ethiopian diaspora from the vantage point of Africana studies.
This conference, therefore, aims to investigate the history of Ethiopia in and
of itself, and its complex relationship to the histories of the African
continent, the wider African diaspora, and the world at large.
Saturday, October 17 |
|
5:30 PM – 6:00 PM |
Hoor Al Qasimi, President, Sharjah Art Foundation and The Africa Institute |
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM |
Exceptionalism and Historiography of Ethiopia | Learn More |
8:15 PM – 9:15 PM |
Ethiopia: Symbol of Black Dignity and Independence | Learn More |
Sunday, October 18 |
|
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM |
Ethiopia and the Black Diasporic Imagination | Learn More
|
8:15 PM – 10:15 PM |
Tumultuous Times: Ethiopia Revolution and Derg Years | Learn More
|
Monday, October 19 |
|
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM |
Square Stories Trilogy | Learn More |
7:30 PM – 8:30 PM |
Twilight Revelations: The Life and Times of Emperor Haile Selassie | |
Wednesday, October 21 |
|
6:00 PM – 7:00 PM |
Artist Focus: A Dialogue with Julie Mehretu | Learn More
|
7:30 PM – 9:00 PM |
The State of Visual Art in Ethiopia: A Roundtable | Learn More
|
Saturday, October 24 |
|
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM |
Writing Ethiopia: Identity and the Literary Imagination | Learn More
|
8:15 PM – 10:15 PM |
Modernity and Memory: Ethiopia’s Histories | Learn More
|
Sunday, October 25 |
|
5:00 PM – 7:00 PM |
Diasporic Ethiopia: Migration and Exile | Learn More
|
7:15 PM – 8:15 PM |
Beyond Exceptionalism: Ethiopia in the History of
International Law | |
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