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New Books in the Arts & Sciences:
Celebrating Recent Work by Elleni Centime Zeleke

Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016
By: Elleni Centime Zeleke

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals where 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 indigenization 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.

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About the Author:

Elleni Centime Zeleke is Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Ethiopia In Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production,1964–2016, among other published works.

About the Speakers:

Jocelyn Alexander is Professor of Commonwealth Studies at the University of Oxford. Her published works include The Unsettled Land: State-making and the Politics of Land in Zimbabwe, 1893–2003; and Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the 'Dark Forests' of Matabeleland, co-authored with JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger.

Mamadou Diouf is Leitner Family Professor of African Studies at Columbia University and Director of Columbia University’s Institute for African Studies. Among his recently published works, he has edited Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal; and co-edited New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, and Power with Mara A. Leichtman and Déborder la Négritude: Arts, politique et société à Dakar (2020) with Maureen Murphy.

Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History at Barnard College and in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India and has recently edited Gender, Caste and the Imagination of Equality; and Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R.B. More.

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination; and, most recently, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, among other published works.