Left Ruins in Ethiopia: Imagining Otherwise Amid Necroepistemic Historiography
Surafel Wondimu Abebe
The Africa Institute of Sharjah (United Arab Emirates)
Abstract
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.
Keywords:
necroepistemology, historiography, neoliberalism, imagination, new humanity, gender, sexualityReferences
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Authors
Surafel Wondimu AbebeThe Africa Institute of Sharjah United Arab Emirates
Surafel Wondimu Abebe is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and Theories at The Africa Institute of Sharjah, UAE, where he completed the Inaugural Okwui Enwezor postdoctoral fellowship in Visual Arts, Performance Studies, and Critical Humanities. Abebe has served as a lecturer, researcher, and deputy dean of Humanities at Addis Ababa University and continued working with the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Center for African Studies, and College of Performing and Visual Arts. He is a research associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg. Abebe engages with sedimented embodied historiography in order to understand what it means to be human in the here and now. Abebe is working on his book project, which studies the ways in which Ethiopian female performers maneuver and reinvent spaces of empires, revolutions, and neoliberal globalization.
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