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To be clear, select this intervention is primarily methodological. Since the book looks at the keyword's revolution, knowledge production, Ethiopia, and at the primary source of students' journals, committee reports, etc., one might be forgiven for presuming that it represents the study of the Ethiopian student movement of radical print culture in Africa, or simply an intellectual history of modern Ethiopia. But the book isn't so much about any of those things as it is a study through them, such subtlety and audacity. Our effectively performed in the repetition of the book's opening line, this book tells the story of how to tell the story of revolution in the third world.
Welcome to new books in African studies. My name is Maizin Chiang. I'm your host. The commentary I just read was an excerpt from a review that Wendell Marsh wrote of Eleni Sentimah's latest book, Ethiopian Theory, which I thought really brilliantly captured what the work was about.
But we'll get to discuss all of this in depth and in detail with the author right now on today's podcast. She is here to talk about Ethiopian Theory, which came out last year with Brill in 2019. Paperback version of the book is just about to come out in October 2020 with Haymarket, which I encourage everybody to get. That's also the cheaper version.
And today we'll just enter a conversation with the author Eleni Sentimah. Welcome on the show. Thank you for having me this morning. Alright, so can you begin by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit more about some of your background, personal and academic?
Sure. So my training is in social and political thought from a program at York University in Canada. And so I think that's the first thing that's important to note is the interdisciplinary training that I have. And that program in social and political thought is really trying to do a critique of political science, but also a critique of the ways in which philosophy is studied without having a history.
So I think my book really represents the kind of training that one gets in this graduate program in social and political thought. So myself, I was born in Ethiopia, but I left Ethiopia when I was a few months old basically. And my parents were in exile from Ethiopia. So the Ethiopian Revolution is something that was always talked about in my house, but was never something that I personally experienced in terms of living in Ethiopia.
But I would always go to Ethiopia in the summer to visit family and that kind of thing. So part of what the book is about is grappling with this thing called Ethiopian Revolution that was such a prominent part of my, the discussion in my family household, but was sort of like invisible to me in many ways. So I experienced the Ethiopian Revolution as a kind of ghost, right? It inhabited my body.
It was part of the family conversation, but I didn't actually experience it directly in many ways. And I think the book is really trying to grapple with the ways in which something like a revolution can exist and bear down on your very existence without necessarily being directly affecting you. Does that make sense? Yeah, it now makes a lot of sense.
And you see this ghost coming back throughout the book in the method and the approach that you take to entering the subject and also in house certain topics from the revolution, keep coming back in Ethiopian politics. But we'll come back to this. And I also really like, I think it was a really good way of entering the description of your book to talk about the kind of training that you got because, indeed, as Wendell's review highlighted and other reviewers highlighted as well, this is not a book to enter expecting to get a book of social sciences, a political science, right? It's more about your inquiry into these things and how the social sciences affected the revolution and affected the lives of people.
So I think it's something that's really helpful, that kind of training that you got helps understand better what the book does pretty much. I mean, I think that the book is actually a critique of the social sciences and it's a critique of political science in the ways in which those disciplines have tried to deal with Ethiopia and has created something called Ethiopian Studies as well or contributed to creating something called Ethiopian Studies. The students that I deal with in the book see themselves as scientists and see themselves as very much bringing the social sciences to Ethiopia. And it's a kind of project that is juxtaposed to the ways in which knowledge has been produced traditionally in Ethiopia, either through the church, through the kinds of manuscripts that were produced by the Ethiopian church or other forms of knowledge production.
So the students really understood themselves as modernists and using the social science as a tool to combat traditional knowledge production. And while I'm not about, while my book isn't necessarily about returning to those different forms of traditional knowledge production, it certainly is a critique of the ways in which social sciences has been transformed knowledge production in Ethiopia. Hi, well that's all rich. We're going to come back to that towards a little bit later in the podcast.
I want to guess right now to it might be helpful, especially for people who are less familiar with the environment, to set the stage a little bit of Ethiopia's politics from the 1960s onwards, which is more or less the time period that your book tackles. Can you lay out for us a little bit of that history, that background? So you want me to sort of recount Ethiopian history from 1960s going forward? Sure, I mean, political history, which is long, but just to give kind of a background for people who are less familiar with it.
So, I mean, what I would say in order to begin was that basically, I mean, we all know about Ethiopia in terms of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the occupation after the Italians left of Ethiopia by the British, and then the British sort of bring back Haidis Alaskan, who was an exile in England to be the ruler of Ethiopia, the King of Kings, et cetera, et cetera, right? And he's often positive as a kind of leader who's linked to a traditional form of governance in Ethiopia, although I would rather theorize Haidis Alaskan himself as the product of all kinds of modernist machinations. But in any case, what you have in Ethiopia from 1945 until 1974 is Haidis Alaskan ruling over the country and trying to bring Ethiopia into global capitalist world, right? So, actually very much transforming local systems of government governance in Ethiopia while he's doing that, setting up a parliamentary system, centralizing power, creating things like a national language, establishing a constitution, and so on.
And in many ways, he's doing that in the name of tradition, but as I said, I don't think he's that traditional at all, right? Because the problem for him is how does he incorporate Ethiopian to into these global capitalist structures. What ends up being produced in Ethiopia is actually an extremely hierarchical system with Haidis Alaskan at the top and then a sort of cavalry of people who might be identified as sort of feudal lords. I mean, some of the literature would describe them as that, and who are, who exact obligations from the peasantry in ways that are pretty exploitative and, again, hierarchical.
But even at this time, you're having a transformation of so-called traditional feudal relationships into something that can align with with capitalist production. So, what you have in the 1960s is a group of students who are responding to the kind of modernization project that is undertaken by somebody like Kailas Alaskan. I'm really questioning the nature of that modernization project. And these students are actually students who are produced by the very same modernization project that Haile Selassie has undertaken.
So, they're students who are being identified as bright in the various modern schools that Haile Selassie has established. He's attempting to create, at this time, a kind of modern bureaucracy that can manage the state in a modern way. And so, he's identifying bright students, he's sending them abroad, they're coming to universities like Columbia, many liberal arts colleges in the US, etc. They're getting a kind of training in the social sciences that is kind of linked to Western knowledge production.
And through their experience of being on these various university campuses, they begin to develop a critique of Haile Selassie and his regime. And in many ways, the student movement is offering a different type of modernization project, a different approach to development than the one that Haile Selassie has undertaken. And they believe that they can use Marxism and the language of socialism to both critique Haile Selassie but to offer an alternative to the type of program that he's undertaken. So, you have a very vigorous debate that's happening in the 1960s in these various student journals that are produced by Ethiopian students on campuses all over the world, from Beirut to New York to Moscow to Algiers.
You have Ethiopian students engaging in a very vigorous debate. And they're aware of each other's publications, they're debating each other across publications, they're having meetings in the world. The worldwide Ethiopian student union is having meetings in different locations around the world from Berlin to New York again to LA. And they're really trying to come up with a program for Ethiopia.
At the same time, they're having vicious fights about what this program should look like and one of the key debates or two of the key issues that come up for the students is how to deal with the question of land, who should own land, what does it mean to return land to the tiller, and what does it mean to have a land reform program, so as to make agriculture more productive in Ethiopia. So that's one issue. The other issue is what gets called the nationalities question, which for most people would be understood as the question of ethnicity. So how do you deal with the different ethnic groups in Ethiopia?
How do you deal with the fact that you have multiple language groups, you have at least 80 language groups in Ethiopia? How do you bring all of these people into a modern nation state? And do you do that through a decentralized system where people still can have schooling and education and conduct commerce through their local languages? Or do you create a kind of homogenous Ethiopian identity through something like Amharic?
And even through under high, it's the last attempt to create an Ethiopian identity is through Amharic and Christianity and so on. So then the debate about how to deal with this question of all of these ethnicities and so on. And that debate actually I would say is something that has definitely resonated throughout multiple generations in Ethiopia. And it's still like the fiery question that plagues the Ethiopian state to this day.
So I would say many of the way which the problem of ethnicity is being dealt with is also because of the way it was shaped through the student movement, right? So the student movement was successful in many ways because in the 1974 revolution, the ways in which some section of the student movement talk about the nationalities question one over the state. I mean, how this elastic was toppled in 1974 part of the student movement moved, they moved into power. You have many of the people who are writing the student journals and advising the state on how to articulate things around the land question, the nationalities question.
But even the people who opposed the revolution or the military huncha that took over after 1974 are the rebel groups that oppose that regime are also part of the student movement. And the same people who were having those debates in those student journals prior to the 1974 revolution. So they go into the bush, they become rebels, they become Maoists and so on. And they fight this kind of more centralized form of socialism that takes hold of the state after 1974.
And after 1974, the way that the nationalities question is answered is to not really answer it, is to just create a kind of centralized socialist state where everybody is fighting towards world revolution. And so, you know, it is the nationalities question or ethnicity is seen as kind of an important or distracting to the larger goal. So you have these rebels who are saying actually in a peasant economy in Ethiopia, the nationalities question has to be forefronted because that's the primary way in which people experience their everyday life is through their ethnic group, et cetera, et cetera. And that critique becomes the way in which they fight the Derg regime, the military huncha between 1974 and 1990, the early 90s, when obviously all regimes that were aligned to the Soviet Union fall.
And actually that the side of the student movement that articulated the nationalities question in terms of respecting people's language rights and so on. That side won over the state. And by 1994, you have a new constitution where the right, that new constitution is brought forth in the name of the nations, nationalities and peoples of Ethiopia. So we have a decentralized system that's established after 1994, and the constitution is actually very much written, as I said, in the name of these various groups, and the right to self-determination of all the nations, nationalities, and peoples of Ethiopia are guaranteed in that new constitution in 1994.
And I think the other thing to point out though is that that language of nations, nationalities, and peoples really comes out of language developed by the Soviet Union to talk about the ethnic problem. And in the debates that are being had within the student movement, they're really taking on that language of the Soviet Union so that you never see the language of ethnicity in the student movement conversation that's always about nations, nationalities, and peoples. And that language is very interesting because it's very evolutionary. So you have tribes who are really the people who are understood as peoples, and then you have nationalities, and then eventually you evolve into a nation.
And so the various groups in Ethiopia are understood to be in various states of development towards becoming nationalities. And that's the way in which the ethnicity problem is framed even today in Ethiopia. So that constitution governs the ethnic problem in Ethiopia today. All right, I think that's enough in terms of a history, yes?
I mean, we could keep going for really long time. It's so interesting. Well, I mean, many things. One, because, you know, I'm thinking, I mean, we're talking right about recording the podcast and I was telling you about currently and right now in Mali, we're getting through yet another, I wouldn't call that a revolutionary moment, but we just had a cool moment where a lot of people are talking about re-foundation of the state re-organizing, you know, like erasing everything that was before and creating something new.
And we're seeing a lot of discussions about, you know, the politicians or the political class should listen to what the researchers, what the social sciences have to say, you know, like their opinions are never taken into account. We should listen to the researchers, they produce stuff in the social science. We should see like their studies and see how we can apply that to Mali. And as I was listening to you, it's so interesting because it's, in the case you're describing, it's literally a case of like these two different movements.
They're the ones with them like take on like, you know, seize the states and like take on the revolution and carry out, I guess, the things that they had theorized. And you also see the pitfalls of that, right? And I guess that's a question you critique, like how the CZ social science concepts design perhaps elsewhere and appropriate it and make Ethiopia fit into it, you know, at any cost, like at any end all cost. I don't know, that part is really interesting.
And you know, when you see these questions showing up today still as well, in the current situation, in Ethiopia and things that are happening in Ethiopian politics, I mean these questions have landed, this question of nationality came coming back also. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think there's enough. So I feel like your question had two different parts to it.
One is around the legacy of the social sciences and the other is just around like sort of current politics and the ways in which the land and nationalities question has been articulated. So just to say that I think one of the things that's interesting about Ethiopia is the ways in which every time you have a change in regime or every time you have kind of like opposition and you have an opposition movement, what they do is that they wield the social sciences as a kind of tool against the people that they're fighting. So I have a chapter in my book around social science as a battlefield. And literally, you can think about the social sciences in Ethiopia as part of a larger battlefield that is actually connected to to military strategy as much as it's connected to epistemological maneuvers.
So, you know, one of the things that's interesting to me is the ways in which different groups in Ethiopia will say, no, but I have greater access to the truth. There is a reality out there, you know, but you opposition person or you government person, you are deluded about the ways in which you understand reality. I actually have discovered what reality is that I can move towards a more perfect version of knowledge that you obviously because of your mistaken orientation are unable to move towards, right? And use that movement towards perfect knowledge as a kind of way to have a battle against your opponent, right?
So it becomes the political field is also a field that people are struggling over truth, right? And I thought it was so interesting because I kind of seeing this happening over and over again. And some ways the book is about my own fatigue with the ways in which truth is constantly being mobilized and demobilized by various groups, according to who has access to more truth in a particular moment, right? And I was like, how do we get out of this conundrum, this impasse where the only way for me to make a maneuver is to say, well, I have a better truth, right?
And I have to think that's part of the problem of what's going on in Ethiopia today. So just to come back to the second part of your question then, you know, what I think what has led to the particular moment that we are in today is in 2014, you started to have a lot of protests against the expansion of Addisababa, which is a capital city, into agricultural lands and into what was into lands that are probably cultivated by a Romo people. So, aromos are a particular ethnic group in Ethiopia. And so you had protests against the expansion of Addisababa by the Aroma group.
And it was really about land in Ethiopia is still access to land. And Ethiopia is still guaranteed in the Constitution. So land is not privatized. Everybody has the right to cultivate land in Ethiopia.
And yet, there was a way in which at the city level legislation was approved such that in the name of development, land could actually be privatized and given to people with capital to build skyscrapers and malls and all those kinds of things that you now see in Addisababa today. So you have this protest against that kind of development that is on the one hand a protest against the fact that land is supposed to be guaranteed, but that protest is done in the name of ethnicity or the name of the Aromo people. And so what you have in 2014 is a battle again over the terms established by the student movement around the access to land, around the fact that land should go to the tiller, around the fact that if people are being displaced from land, it's also about the ways of which people are being displaced from producing within their ethnic group and so on. And in many ways, what led us to the crisis today is the fact that that protest was led in the name of, as I said, the nationalities question, and in the name of the Aromo people.
We were supposed to be reopening this question of how can people be, how can nations, nationalities and peoples anything but be guaranteed their rights. And that's basically how the previous regime fell in Ethiopia in many ways is that supposedly they were not upholding the very constitution that they brought into power right there was a kind of gap between the two. And yet as soon as sort of Abi Ahmed came into power and as we see this more recently, he has had to centralize power around him and he has had to shut down the question of the national, well shut down the nationalities question. And in the name of development, continue some of those programs that were undertaken by the previous machine.
And so we're in this really weird conundrum in Ethiopia again where somebody who came into power in the name of the nationalities question is now shutting down groups of people and saying they need to work for the nation state rather than get get mired in making demands particular demands for particular ethnic groups. All right. I want to give gears a little bit and get into now that you really said that for us I guess get into the. The crux of what the book is about.
We opened the podcast with this short excerpt from that review that Wendell wrote which I wanted to ask you whether or not you thought that just this year book because I was telling you for me this is really what helped me enter actually the book that this is a book of theory. So back as you said yourself later on like a critique of the social sciences and how they shaped so much of policies and politics in Ethiopia and also how you guys perceive. So I'm going to get a little bit more into that into this theoretical and methodological insight that you bring in. And I want to start with what you start with in the book.
So can you talk about can we talk about this data. What is it and more importantly what did you do with it in the book that will help us understand a little bit more what your project was and what it is that you were trying to do. So it is just a very very sad song and some levels and the most famous tizata song is by Mahmoud Ahmed who is a very famous Ethiopian singer he did a tizata song that he recorded perhaps just a few weeks after the 1974 revolution it's 13 minutes long, and it's a very very long lament about sort of what have we lost where are we going. I think a typical lyric in the song goes something like my tizata is you so my I don't have to tizata actually translates as memory or nostalgia.
But it's also a genre of music making but it's also a musical scale as well so it's referring to multiple things at the same time. And I'm hard because one of those languages where every word has like five different meanings depending on the right. People are always playing with with meaning right. So if you think about a lyric like my tizata is you I don't have tizata my memory is you I don't have memory that could be one rendition.
I don't have my nostalgia anymore or I could be referring to the actual form of the music because tizata is a genre of music it's also musical scale so maybe it's about the loss of form as much as it's about the loss of a memory or the loss of a loved one right. And I think that any theopia people like if you think about literary traditions in Ethiopia people are often thinking about the relationship between form and content. And I think in the tizata song for me what's striking is the relationship between form and content. But in any case when I was writing the book which started as a dissertation.
I would spend a lot of time listening to tizata in my attic in Toronto being sad and sort of conjuring ghosts and conjuring the past and I think that's what tizata does in a way it's a way of conjuring the past. But it's also lament about I guess the loss of form and the loss of content and it questions the ways in which the past has come down to you as an inheritance. And I was interested in thinking about the ways in which the past has come down to me as an inheritance the sense of loss that I had in terms of relating to this inheritance. And to actually to stay with that sense of loss not to vanquish that loss of the field that loss with more facts and more social science knowledge but actually to think about loss as a place through which knowledge can be produced right.
And I think because tizata is always showing us that there's a kind of gap between form and content that it allowed me to think about the gap that is the silence that is produced by an experience of loss. Yeah, I think in my writing I'm trying to think about genre and form and the ways in which the past has come down to me and what it means to live with the past. But I think you know the other thing that tizata alerts us to is that the past can erupt in the present in unexpected ways. So if you can lose the memory of your lover the form in which that memory comes to you is unstable and the past can erupt in in strange ways.
And so the relationship between past and present is unstable but also uncanny. So it's not something that you can control through just thinking you have access to the past as a stable thing. The past is not an object that exists in an archive that just you can go and collect and present to the world. The past is something that sort of erupts in unpredictable ways in the present.
And so those are all the things I was trying to capture with that term. Yes. And that was a way to get out of the conundrum presented by the social sciences. Because the social sciences in a way, you know, things about reality is out there.
Reality is something that can be discovered. It can be, you know, we can perfect our scientific tools. And like I said before, we can perfect the kinds of knowledges that we produce. And every generation of scholars is supposed to produce better and better knowledge, right?
In this path towards perfection. I really wanted. And I think that's part of the battlefield that we see in Ethiopia when social sciences gets used as a tool against one's opponent. Because like, well, I have more perfect knowledge.
I really wanted to move out of that paradigm. Not by simply becoming super subjectivist and being like, well, this is my experience and I don't know. But actually, this thing about some physical allows you to think about emotion, affect, feeling as both a collective experience, but as something that is uncanny and unstable at the same time. So those are the things that I was trying to do.
Does that make sense? I hope that you. Yes, no, you did. And we were talking right before this.
Like, I think what I found really great about this part of the book, it's not one part of the book, it comes back throughout. But that as you said, you really did get out of this conundrum of the social sciences that will study and reflect reality in as precise a manner as possible. So it's the intent at least. And I thought it was really great how you got out of this.
And also, we're really honest about this process. Like, you know how it came to you and how you were part of this and this is how you experienced or how the revolution kept reverberating, like in your own experience, in your own body, et cetera. And how this informs how you write about Ethiopia and how you think about it. So that was definitely the part that struck the most for me in reading the book.
And I think we'll have a lot for a lot of readers. I want to explore these questions a little bit more. Sorry, go ahead. Just to say that I start with my body and the experience of my body thinking about this revolution, but I take my body not just as some kind of singular entity that is bounded, but the body as a set of relationships with other people.
And to think about the past as bearing down on me as a set of relationships rather than the past as bearing down on me as a kind of singular entity with clear boundaries. If that makes sense. Yeah. I think that's an important thing.
So I'm not trying to get away from reality. I just think that the way that reality exists within us is not exactly as this kind of object that is out there that is separate from the person. The person who's doing the inquiry and I don't think that's ever the case, even for the person who claims to be objective. Right.
Exactly. Yeah, which is a big claim right now. You have to study the study this object as objectively as possible. Yeah.
A big claim in social science. Can you tell us a little bit about the, so as we're saying at the beginning of the podcast, the paperback version of your book is about to come out in a few weeks. In terms of the book cover of that paperback version that's coming up with a market. Sure.
So the book cover is, it's primarily a painting from Hamid Abdullah who was a modernist painter in Egypt. I believe he was born probably around 1917, which is an auspicious year. He died perhaps in the 1980s. He has this technique where he takes Arabic calligraphy and he transforms that calligraphy into human figures.
And the painting that I use in my, as a cover of my book is called defeat. And I think it's actually playing with that with the word defeat in Arabic. And it's just sort of these figures slouched over these bodies leaning on each other, who are again in this way that I was describing my own body as part of a collective experience that I think of the body as unbounded and a set of relationships. But I like the idea of defeat too, because I think it captures something about that whole region.
In the 1960s, which is full of kind of revolutionary fervor, and yet that fervor is being defeated in a series of coups and that kind of thing. Yeah. So I, and I think I wanted to, maybe I'm being a bit provocative in using an Egyptian painter on the cover of a book called Ethiopia in theory. Obviously, there's a lot of like pensioners between Egypt and Ethiopia right now around who owns the Nile waters.
And what has struck me about that conversation about who owns the Nile waters is how little that conversation has been about sort of people to people needs. It's been about nation state versus nation state. And obviously Ethiopian Egypt are countries that have been implicated in each other's histories for a long time. And so I wanted to maybe remind my readers and remind myself of that kind of interconnected history in the ways in which the third world was thought of in more international terms at a particular point.
And how far we've moved from that point as well. Right. Yeah, no for sure. That's definitely, and the current dispute is definitely how it's set as well.
Like Ethiopia and Egypt and what Ethiopia being thought of as this more African entity. I mean, Ethiopia has a particular place in Africa and in African studies, but so does Egypt, right? And you see that play out even in this dispute right now. Yeah.
Let's talk about African studies and black studies a little bit. Because your book is a critique of the social science and you try to, you come up with a method of how to overcome some of the problems that you identified with them. And that's something that we haven't seen as much of in African studies. I think this is something that perhaps the project of black studies has taken on a little bit better.
So I guess I wanted you to tell us a little bit more about how you drew from each field, but also pushed back against perhaps some developments in each field to build your method in this book and in this project. Right. Right. So, I mean, one thing that I always would say to myself when I was doing my PhD was I was like nobody wants to teach black girl from Africa.
How to think about Africa, right? Some people will still go ahead into it, but yes, you're right. If you're a white woman, you will easily access a bunch of tools to do African studies. You're a white man.
I think that's also the case. But like what does it mean for a black woman from Africa to actually study Africa? I think there's not a lot of examples. And even if you look at something like the history of the African studies association, black women do not occupy positions of relevance within that association or perhaps more so now than before.
But you know, black women haven't really received prizes within that association or produced the literature that is associated with African studies. Right. Although there's a lot of white women that are part of the legacy of African studies. So that was always interesting to me.
So African studies for me is something that is very different from black studies. It is it's part of perhaps colonial apparatus or it definitely takes Africa as an object that is south of the Sahara that can be studied and that is, you know, primitive and where communities exist. In these kind of local situations and we can study, we can study these local groups of people and produce sort of anthropological knowledge about them. And to me, African studies still operates in that kind of case study paradigm, if you will.
And there's a way in which the problem of race is seen as a problem of the West. And that, you know, we don't really need to take questions of race seriously in African studies. That's for those other people elsewhere. Right.
Right. Right. Or it's or you're having too much of a, you know, American, point of view, we should try to bring up these questions of racing to African studies. So something that we can get a lot.
Right. Right. So that seemed odd to me because, as I said before, my particular position was one that where I felt like as an African black woman, I was not being given the tools to do African studies. So I think I went to black studies because black studies is really trying to think about the existence of black people in the world.
And it, black studies has a long critique of the social sciences and the problems of the social sciences in relation to black folks globally. And I think the question of self-reflexivity is much bigger in black studies than it is in African studies. So even if race can be acknowledged as a problem in African studies, it's always technical. It's like, oh, let's have some more black people on this committee.
Right. Right. Well, that kind of thing is never a question of how do I approach the study of Africa thinking about race? How do I develop different kinds of methodologies?
How do I write differently given the history of race in Africa? Right. So those questions of how do I write? What is the proper form for studying Africa?
Those are not questions that have been brought up in African studies at all, but those are questions that are endemic to black studies. So I was like, well, this is where I need to go in order to figure out what I'm doing in my own book. And so I situate my book as somewhere between black studies and African studies. The problem with black studies, because there hasn't been this separation between the continent and the African diaspora, black studies unfortunately has not developed a lot of research or literature that deals with the continent as such.
It is very much the diaspora experience. So it's a bit strange for me, because I think at the level of method, I'm probably talking more to black studies, but in terms of like who studies the continent, black studies doesn't really actually study the continent. Right. So it's a strange.
I'm hoping that my work in some ways bridges those gaps. And I hope to continue doing that in the future as well. Yeah, it really does bridge the gap. And I think it's a good thing.
I mean, I absolutely agree with what you said, like in principle, it's two fields that don't really talk to each other. And there's definitely a lot of the methods of black study, which are black studies, which are really fantastic to study Africa, don't really consider Africa like continental Africa. It's often diasporic, it's often diatlantic. And I think it's great that you're doing that with your work and that hopefully we'll see more of that.
You know, I think increasing the amount of products try to take that on, but it's something that we definitely need more of. Right. I will say that I grew up in the Caribbean. So I grew up in Guyana and Barbados.
And I think that my research orientation comes out of sort of living in those places. And I think the commitment of intellectuals in the Caribbean has always been about questioning the ways in which knowledge has been produced. And so I think that actually I'm a Caribbean Ethiopian scholar. I took all my experience of being Caribbean and the ways questions are posted.
I was like, let me take it to Ethiopian and see what happens. And the result is great. Caribbean is a great scholar. I like that.
I wanted to ask you, who are some of the people or what are some of the kinds of projects or kinds of writings that you think also like your book are starting to get at that or to inspire you in bridging these gaps. Like are there other writers, other projects, other writings that inspire you in this way? And I think also take on that project that you're trying to take on? Sure.
I mean, so I think, you know, when sort of when I first came across Kowani, which was a journal that was produced in Nairobi, it was started by Binyavanga in the early 2000s, that journal actually blew my mind. And they did it. They did an issue on the Kenyan elections in 2008 when there was a lot of violence and the ways in which they tried to think about sort of political violence was so different from the kinds of things. We see in the political science literature, which always felt so empty to me.
And I was just like, you know, I don't really know how to deal with political science, but ultimately what it tells us is that Africans have pathologies. And that becomes the story over and over again. I mean, these set a very fancy language. And what was really thinking about these questions through poetry, through art, through photography, and as a lived experience that belonged to the people that were writing about it.
And so, and there was something a reverent about Kowani that was amazing to me. And I think the other site, the other sort of literary platform that's important has been important to me is Chimeranga, which is a literary platform that's based in South Africa. That does really funky stuff. So the most recent project that they did was looking at the Festak, which was a festival in the Pan-African festival that happened in Nigeria in, I believe it was 1977, I might have the year.
Not even 730, right? And the ways in which they, I mean, the question that Chimeranga poses is, how do they pose it? They say, you know, what if the past has to cut, what if the present has to catch up with a past that is, you know, continuing to haunt the present. And they really play with time and they think of their publications as these time machines that are scrambling the archive and doing funky things about how we pose questions.
But what I really like about both Chimeranga and Kowani is that they're really a reverent about how they go about answering questions that are important to the continent. And when I read something like Chimeranga, the Festak project is one, but also they had a book recently come out, which is anthology of writing around Kabbila, posing the question of who killed Kabbila. And again, the writing is so different from what we're used to within the social science literature, but it felt more true, or at least the writing is more of a proper interrogation into kind of the African existence, even if it doesn't necessarily come up with like answers or solutions as such, right? So we're just posing good questions.
And we so often don't know how to pose good questions in African studies. So I mean, where I look for good writing is not within African studies, it's actually within these venues. I feel like Chimeranga is doing what African studies should do in a way that African studies does not seem to be doing at all. I hope African studies is listening.
No, and I think it's so great that you started with Ethiopia to do that for your project because, you know, out of all places in Africa, almost, that's definitely a place that everybody is appropriated, like in African discourse, in African discourse, in all kinds of environments, you know, everybody has sort of taken on an appropriated Ethiopia and then made it to fit into whatever project they had. So it's kind of an ideal place, I think, to start for you with that project. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I don't try to be like, they're all right or wrong. I'm just like, well, if you think about the reciprocatism, the ways in which they deal with Ethiopia, there's definitely the truth to the story that they're telling.
But it's also limited to the question of your contrast, that truth with like, you know, an aroma, I mean, literally you have rastas in an aroma region in Ethiopia, who are like, this is high to Celeste's land and they're almost like no high to Celeste, you know, civil land and he's a colonizer, right? And then the rastas are like saying to the Romans, y'all are babylon system. So, I mean, that's really interesting in terms of how historical narratives clash. But my point is not to say that the rastas are wrong or the aromas are right or anything, but actually think about, again, the ways in which the past has lived as an experience for rastas and the ways in which the past has lived as an experience for the arastasas as an experience for the arastas.
And is there some way in which if we pay attention to that kind of living tradition, can we make sense of both of these narratives together? I think that's the question that I'm actually trying to get at with my work more broadly. Oh, so what's next then? What are you thinking about right now?
What are the ideas? What are the projects? Like, where are you going to take that project and that work in the future? Sure.
So, I mean, I think that what I just told you about the rastas and the aromas is an interesting story. I really am trying to think about how the past has lived as a present as a set of relationships and how does that become a method for thinking about how to make it happen. How does that become a method for thinking about Addisalba as a city that's the capital city, but also contested city where, again, there's a romo claims around what Addisalba is, but then there's other people who say Addisalba is a federal city, it should have no ethnic identity, etc. So I actually want to go back and think about how Addisalba was founded as a name.
It actually means New Flower. It was very much founded as a project to lead Ethiopia, the nation state, into the modern world. The question is who was displaced when it was founded? I want to ask that, but what did that displacement mean?
How do we think about displacement in relation to the kinds of struggles Ethiopia was undertaking as a battle in imperialism and I'm here, I'm talking about imperialism of Europe, the Italians, etc. So I'm really trying to think about the early history of Addisalba, late 19th century until the 1960s, to rethink just what Ethiopia as a nation state has been, but also what has it meant to incorporate Ethiopians into a global capitalist world. I mean, I would also say why Addisalba is interesting for me is because it marks this moment when Ethiopia's become African, but they also become black in many ways. And so by rethinking those founding moments of Addisalba, I could also rethink the category Africa and the category black as well.
Does that make sense? It answered my question and it's great. I'm really excited to see where you're going to go with that work and with this work in general. And I think African studies the field will have a lot to chew on with this current book and also with your next projects.
And I'm really grateful that you shared a little bit of that with us today. Yeah, we've taken up enough of your time. So I guess we'll close the podcast. So again, for our listeners, I want to remind everyone, this was in Lenny Santimis-Elica talking about her recent book, Ethiopian Theory, Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964, 2016.
The book came out last year with Briel, and a paperback version is about to come out with Haymarket in 2020. Get that one, get the paperback version. It has a cheaper price tag and it has the cool cover that we just discussed in this podcast. And yeah, thank you so much again for joining us today.
I really, really love our conversation. Thank you for having me. It was really fun for me as well.