Left Ruins in Ethiopia

Imagining Otherwise Amid Necroepistemic Historiography

Dados Bibliográficos

ID5771637
AutoresSurafel Abebe (autor correspondente), Surafel Wondimu Abebe
Ano2021
Volume70
Fascículo4
Páginas161-182
Data de publicação2021-12-20
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoPamiętnik Teatralny (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0031-0522 • E-ISSN: 2658-2899
EditoraInstytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.36744/pt.992
OpenAlexW4200243337
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas6

This essay uses the notion of necroepistemology to expose the killing of the other as executed by the neoliberal historiography in Ethiopia. Utilizing Fanonian negative dialectics, it critiques the ahistorical, immaterial, and reified object, as well as universal history, promoted by the official Ethiopian historiography's absolute time, space, and matter. It does so to reveal the ways in which the enduring social questions and new imaginations are dismissed by this historiography as the work of the global-local left. To counterbalance this practice, I return to the 1974 Ethiopian socialist revolution and to the staging of Ethiopian socialism as a critical transnational rethinking of the human in the country. At the same time, attending to the everyday struggle of women performers in both the imperial and revolutionary spaces, the essay reminds us how the revolutionary practice, which had envisioned a new social human, ended up marking female performers' bodies as dangerous for the socialist movement. Revealing the ways in which women performers collaborated with and fought against a male revolutionary figure, this essay ends with a call to respond to the current necroepistemic moment to draw attention to the historically vulnerable people who are dying in Ethiopia in the here and now

Dialectic · Historiography · African history and culture analysis · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics