Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals. In these they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society, in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenisation of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally?

Elleni Centime Zeleke, Ph.D (2016), Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her previous work has been published by the Journal of NorthEast African Studies and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters.