Elizabeth W. Giorgis - Modernist Art in Ethiopia

MODERNIST ART IN ETHIOPIA

NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES

SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN, ALLEN ISAACMAN, AND DEREK R. PETERSON

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Elizabeth W. Giorgis, Modernist Art in Ethiopia

MODERNIST ART IN ETHIOPIA

ELIZABETH W. GIORGIS

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

ohioswallow.com

2019 by Ohio University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Giorgis, Elizabeth W., author.

Title: Modernist art in Ethiopia / Elizabeth W. Giorgis.

Other titles: New African histories series.

Description: Athens, Ohio : Ohio University Press, 2019. | Series: New African histories | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018045761| ISBN 9780821423462 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821423479 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780821446539 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Art)--Ethiopia. | Art, Ethiopian--20th century. | Art, Ethiopian--21st century. | Art--Political aspects--Ethiopia.

Classification: LCC N7386 .G56 2019 | DDC 709.630904--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045761

In memory of my brother Getinet Wolde Giorgis.

In memory also of the artists and intellectuals who flourished in the postwar period but who passed on in recent decades, many of whom have not received the acclaim they deserve from a country that they so deeply revered. This book bears witness to their rich and versatile political and cultural lives.

Please tell me bird about his last gasp

You who flew to the downcast dusk

Of a place called Oklahoma, how did it sound?

Trampled with morning chills and struck with gravels of snow

That foreign land

Where the shuttered light of loneliness bemoaned

Uttered words of closure avowed

Please tell me bird about his last gasp

When the shades and hues of Ethiopia shattered

How did it sound?

The conclusion kerarayso Gebre

No proxy can come to compensate

But how was it?

Aye! when a dream got swindled

In Oklahoma a foreign land

Your paintbrush is a torching flame

You blazed Gebre

But I dont know if you have died

Excerpt from Metne Ya Gedegeda (Translation mine)

A tribute to the painter and poet Gebre Kristos Desta, who died in Oklahoma in 1981, by the poet and playwright Tsegaye Gebremedhin. (This powerful poem is hard to translate literally. I simply conveyed the general feeling of the poem.)

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

For six years, I served as the director of the most prominent archive of Ethiopia, the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at Addis Ababa University. If history is selectively produced and silenced in the analytic content of archival production, this is nowhere more pronounced than in the IESs archival space. Some of the urgent questions that I broach in this book were conceived in this same archival space, where the time of a discriminating past emerged in the difficulties and constraints of the present. Fortunately, and all at once woefully, my intimate experiences with this particular archive and the bodies of knowledge that it produced and suppressed spurred my curiosity, and I pedantically read the voices behind the politics of silence. I have used the fundamental analytical questions underlying the archives selective inclusions and exclusions to come up with what we might call a theory of Ethiopian modernity and modernism.

The orthodoxies that shape the studies of Ethiopiaits culture, history, and aesthetic imaginingcall attention to the categories that conjure the images of the country and, most importantly, the extent to which these studies, as fields of study, have undermined the intellectual philosophies that shaped African American, African, and West Indian strands of thought. This exceptionalist perspective, in some of its central positions, has subsequently reduced the significance of the colonial myth and ideology. Furthermore, in a fundamentally hegemonic body of knowledge, it has fostered an implicit, twofold assumption in its definition of Ethiopia. The first is a superior northern and Semitic imagination of Ethiopia. The second is the non-Semitic variety that the field of study persists in constructing as an inferior antithesis, and its vast body of knowledge continues to be absent in the writings of history.

has always frustrated Semitic Orientalism.

Certainly, for the Semitic Orientalists, Ethiopia is what anthropologist Donald Levine called an outpost of Semitic civilization, in which the Judeo-Christian legacies purportedly made the countrys history exceptional and matchless in comparison to the rest of the African continent. For Marxists who reached political maturity in the 1960s, Ethiopia was encumbered by a feudal class structure, and in this regard, Marxist activists claimed the Ethiopian experience was unlike other African encounters. They called for a peasant-led agrarian revolution, which culminated in the mass uprising of 1974 that ousted the monarchy. For advocates of black studies, Ethiopia had historically been symbolic of racial redemption and pride. The countrys unique colonial historyEthiopia was not colonized but only occupied by Italy from 1936 to 1941and its rich history dating back to the Axumite civilization have shaped potent imagery of Ethiopia in black consciousness.