Feasting on History: Ethiopia and the Orientalists

During the brutal Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), the country descended into endless counterinsurgency and mass violence, which specifically targeted local intellectuals with the sanction of Italy’s leading experts. Yet these atrocities followed decades of dialogue between Ethiopian and Italian researchers, and in the postcolonial era, their successors continued to debate Ethiopia’s past and future as survivors and perpetrators. This historical reckoning unfolded against the backdrop of Third World liberation, disputed colonial guilt, and the search for postcolonial justice.

Feasting on History is a wide-ranging intellectual history of the Italian-Ethiopian relationship, told through the intertwined lives of Heruy Wäldä Sellasé, an Ethiopian writer and civil servant, and Enrico Cerulli, an Italian Orientalist and colonial official. It takes place on the battlefields and detention sites of fascist empire, within the evolving institutions of the international system, and throughout the interlinked intellectual worlds of Europe, Africa, and the African diaspora. James De Lorenzi documents the violence perpetrated by experts across these spaces as well as the pioneering Ethiopian effort to address the crimes of empire through international law. He also explores a distinctive European tradition of Africa-focused Orientalism and its critical reception by Ethiopian, African, and Black American scholars, reconstructing a bold multilingual commentary on colonial knowledge, self-determination, and the global color line.

Challenging conventional narratives of African and European intellectual history, Feasting on History vividly illuminates the links among weaponized research, colonial trauma, and the modern international order.

James De Lorenzi is associate professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is the author of Guardians of the Tradition: Historians and Historical Writing in Ethiopia and Eritrea (2015) and coauthor of The Many Lives of Täsfa Ṣeyon: An Ethiopian Intellectual in Early Modern Rome (2024).