Book Blurbs

Ethiopia in Theory deserves the widest readership. First for its recovery of the intellectual and political enterprise of the last three Ethiopian generations through a dazzling method at once archival, literary, and auto/ethnographic. Second for illuminating a dark space in Twentieth-century global history: how intellectuals outside Europe, or in diasporas, put Marxism and ‘Western’ social sciences to work. Historians of elsewhere in the Tricontinent will find a valuable lens in this portrait of the intellectual origins, climax and aftermaths of the Ethiopian Revolution. For it was not just in Ethiopia that the emancipatory promise of c. 1960 collapsed through its own contradictions and yet, like the anchor to a blues chord, stubbornly persists.

Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History, King’s College London, author of Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World.

Ethiopia in Theory is an ambitious, surprising book. Its focus is the Ethiopian student movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Addis Ababa and across the globe, and its relationship to the great upheavals of revolutionary Ethiopia. It gives us a highly original analysis of the ideas produced by this movement based on a close reading of its texts, but does much more than that too. It offers not just an analysis of the social science ideas of the students themselves and the ways in which they shaped and were shaped by Ethiopian history, but also of the categories used to study those ideas. This double move reflects a deep interest in understanding the politics of knowledge production in Ethiopia and Africa, and gives us a novel means of doing so. It is a move that is also rooted in Zeleke’s own life story, and is thus an act of self-recovery too. This crossing of disciplines, genres and viewpoints has produced an extraordinarily productive and engaging account of a momentous time.

Jocelyn Alexander, Professor of Commonwealth Studies, University of Oxford, author of The Unsettled Land: The Politics of Land and State-making in Zimbabwe, 1893-2003.

This superb book will transform all discussions concerning the production of knowledge. Ranging through the archives, moving across philosophy and critical theory, and traversing social history, Ethiopia in Theory frames a stunningly original account of the Ethiopian student movement of the 1960s and ‘70s as a site for the production of radical social science. Rather than the mere reception of revolutionary theory in an African context, Zeleke shows us the dynamics of its generation. There is truly nothing in the literature that comes close to the depth of this multi-leveled, interdisciplinary study. Zeleke’s outstanding book deserves the widest possible readership in social history, African studies, post-colonial analysis, and Marxist and critical theory in general.

David McNally, Cullen Distinguished Professor of History, University of Houston, author of Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism

Political research on the period from roughly 1966 to the mid-1970s often fail to articulate the global dimensions of student movements in African countries.  This much-overdue study of the Ethiopian example offers, with nuance, rich historical evidence, and wonderfully clear prose, the revolutionary situation in which, as its author Elleni Centime Zeleke aptly puts it, the bandit is transformed into “a guerilla or leader.”  In response to those who cry “illiberalism,” this work reveals an alignment with other movements of what is at times called “the black radical tradition” through which the response, echoed with explanatory force and defiance through the corridors of history, is that those at the bottom cannot and should not wait. As such, this extraordinary book also illuminates the complexity, strengths, and shortcomings of revolutionary forms of knowledge and praxis in Afro-modernity.

Lewis R. Gordon, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, author of Existentia Africana and What Fanon Said.

An original and pathbreaking study of the ideology and the intellectual traditions that informed the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. Ethiopia in Theory provides sophisticated analysis of the ideas of the Ethiopian student movement of the 1960s and the way in which these ideas have continued to shape state policies in contemporary Ethiopia. This meticulously researched book offers a unique perspective for the study of revolutions and the socialist experience in Africa as well as the process of local knowledge production. It will undoubtedly appeal to a wide range of scholars beyond the field of African studies.

Ahmad Sikainga, Professor of African History, Ohio State University, author of City of Steel and Fire: A social History of Atbara, Sudan’s Railway Town, 1906-1984.