A new generation of Ethiopianists: the Universal Ethiopian Students Association and The African: Journal of African Affairs, 1937–1948

Abstract

This paper explores the obscure Universal Ethiopian Student Association (UESA) and the journal that began as their organ, The African: Journal of African Affairs (1937–1948), as an example of modern Ethiopianism. It analyzes The African for clues about what the UESA was, who was involved, who it purported to speak for and to, and the kinds of cross-metropole (and metropole-colony) networks and associations it fostered. The author asserts that unlike many similar political and student organizations of the time, the UESA represents a new generation of Ethiopianists: African nationalists in the traditional sense, committed to the nascent decolonization and pan-african political movements of the era. They also supported Ethiopia and Haile Selassie I at almost all costs, championing both the nationalist and imperialist nature of the modern Ethiopian state in the name of preserving its political sovereignty and role as a leader in Africa and the black world.     

Passive revolution in Brazil: struggles over hegemony,religion and development 1964–2007

This article examines transformations of the role of religion in Brazil, focused on two transitions within the national political economy. A Gramscian framework of analysis is used to investigate the shift from import substitution industrialisation to neoliberalism, and the varying role of religion within class struggles in each period. The central argument is that Brazil has moved from a period of ‘passive revolution’ to one of ‘hegemony’, and that the role of religion has changed significantly in this period. The article examines ideas, institutions and social forces, with particular attention to the Landless Workers Movement and its relationship with Liberation Theology.     

Conformism and Agency: Model Young Communists and the Komsomol Press in the Later Khrushchev Years, 1961–1964

This essay examines newspaper narratives depicting model youth in Komsomol'skaya Pravda in the early 1960s in order to cast light on the Party-state's efforts in the Khrushchev years to use the press as a means of re-energising the drive to forge model communist citizens. In contrast to most studies of Soviet media, this study offers a glimpse of the reception of official signals, by drawing on sociological studies that Komsomol'skaya Pravda conducted of its readers in the early 1960s. Throughout, the paper explores recent scholarly discussions of resistance, conformism and agency in the Soviet context.     

Biopolitics,borders, and refugee camps: exercising sovereign power over nonmembers of the state†

This article addresses the relationship between the concepts of national identity and biopolitics by examining a border-transit camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers in Germany. Current studies of detention spaces for migrants have drawn heavily on Agamben’s reflection on the “camp” and “homo sacer,” where the camp is analyzed as a space in a permanent state of exception, in which the government exercises sovereign power over the refugee as the ultimate biopolitical subject. But what groups of people can end up at a camp, and does the government treat all groups in the same way? This article examines the German camp for repatriates, refugees, and asylum seekers as a space where the state’s borders are demarcated and controlled through practices of bureaucratic and narrative differentiation among various groups of people. The author uses the concept of detention space to draw a theoretical link between national identity and biopolitics, and demonstrates how the sovereign’s practices of control and differentiation at the camp construct German national identity through defining “nonmembers” of the state. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork at the Friedland border transit camp and on a discourse analysis of texts produced at the camp or for the camp.     

Orientalism and African Development Studies: the ‘reductive repetition’ motif in theories of African underdevelopment

Contemporary Africa is generally depicted as a ‘failure’. ‘Progress' has eluded the continent throughout the 20th century, and despite new ways of thinking about the reasons for failure and possibilities for success, allusions to the ‘natural weakness and incapacity’ of Africans and their social realities remain evident in theoretical, policy and political discourse on development in Africa. The practice of ‘reductive repetition’, as identified by Abdallah Laroui and Edward Said, has been imported into African development studies from Orientalist scholarship. Reductive repetition reduces the diversity of African historical experiences and trajectories, sociocultural contexts and political situations into a set of core deficiencies for which externally generated ‘solutions’ must be devised. In the field of development studies, the notion of development is introduced to Africa as a deus ex machina. In this article modern conceptualisations of development are challenged in three steps. First, it traces the history of development discourse over the post-Berlin Conference colonial and post-WWII development eras, suggesting that, while rhetoric of racial and cultural inferiority has been transformed, the notion of African deficiency remains at the conceptual and discursive levels. Second, the primarily liberal idea that ‘development for all’ is possible is challenged as being an ecological and economic, and therefore also social, impossibility. Third, given the problems of growth-based development, the article suggests that modern development theory ought to give way to post-developmental thinking which challenges standard a priori assumptions regarding rationality, linearity and modernity, thus offering some modest hope for a move ‘beyond’ the current development impasse.     

The ‘end of diaspora’ is just the beginning: music at the crossroads of Jewish,African, and Ethiopian diasporas in Israel

ABSTRACT

The ‘return’ of Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the last three decades provides an alternative case. In this presentation, I focus on the prominent role of music as ethno-racial information for Ethiopian Israelis as they engage with the process of homing and integrating in Israel. I explore their experience as black Jews through the musical tastes of young Ethiopian Israelis. For these youths, far from leaving their Ethiopianness behind, music is the fodder for actively reinventing it. I explore how they claim their place as Jews in Israel through participation in the musical communities of Ethiopian and African diasporas.