Elleni Centime Zeleke | Columbia University (original) (raw)

Books by Elleni Centime Zeleke

Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016, Historical-Materialism Book Series, Brill and Haymarket Books, Vol 201. , 2019

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, a... more 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?

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Papers by Elleni Centime Zeleke

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022

This essay outlines a research agenda the authors call “Third World Historical,” combining reflec... more This essay outlines a research agenda the authors call “Third World Historical,” combining reflections from Ethiopia and Iran to query the legacies of revolutionary politics in our present. Third world activists from the 1960s and 1970s engaged revolutionary talk to pose questions about the particularities of their immediate contexts, and they posed new concepts of revolution along the way. Congealed manifestations of the term revolution can preclude our effort to think the event as experience. If revolution signals the disruption of existing categories, can we in turn disrupt congealed categories to rethink revolution? What could it mean to reposition the question of revolution in the specificity of the third world, against the tendency to map revolutions as models, patterns, and stages?

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from... more This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from the perspective of Southern Africa. The interlocutors discuss the question of violence and nonviolence in revolutionary change across generational divides. It centers the enduring place of spirit and ancestral voices in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

This dialogue, recorded in late 2020, brings together a group of remarkable critics and creators ... more This dialogue, recorded in late 2020, brings together a group of remarkable critics and creators working between Asia, Africa, and the West, each of whom address the relationship between revolutions and archives in their own practice. What does it mean, in practice, to unlearn the archive? What does it mean to do so from the global periphery, the still present specter of a third world?

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Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016, 2020

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Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020

In a study of “transborder ex changes” be tween Mah dist Sudan and the king doms and principaliti... more In a study of “transborder ex changes” be tween Mah dist Sudan and the king doms and principalities in pres entday Ethiopia, Iris Seri-Hersch shows how the very no tion of a “bor der” was reshaped by both Tur co-Egyp tian and Eu ro pean im pe rial dy nam ics on the Af ri can con ti nent in the late nineteenth cen tu ry.1 Under Eu ro pean pres sure, the Tur co-Egyp tian ad min is tra tion in Cairo be gan to un der stand ter ri to ri al ity in Northeast Africa as both ef ec tive oc cu pa tion and the land where Mus lims lived, that is, as a place with a fixed cul tural iden ti ty. On the other hand, the princes, sheiks, and chiefs liv ing in what is now Sudan and Ethiopia were more concerned with “ef ec tive con trol”: the ca pac ity to or ga nize raids and col lect tax es. Any no tion of a bor der would have been un der stood as “an un defined zone extending into their neigh bors lands.”2 However, by around 1876 we find one Ethi o pian lead er, Yohannes IV, appropriating the idea of ...

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This article traces the story of how the intellectual culture and discourses that animated the Et... more This article traces the story of how the intellectual culture and discourses that animated the Ethiopian student movement in the 1960s and 1970s have continued to impact political processes in the country in the generations since. More specifically, it looks at how the legacy of the Ethiopian student movement influenced events during the country’s momentous 2005 elections. The essay further poses the question of how one can characterize and understand the influence of the social sciences on actual social forces in a particular historical context.

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Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2010

... Since the 1960s a number of artists have taken it upon themselves to paint their own version ... more ... Since the 1960s a number of artists have taken it upon themselves to paint their own version of a univer-sal yet Ethiopian mother under that title. These include Aleka Gebre Selassie Adil (1960) and Tesfaye Mandefro (1965). ... Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999). ...

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Callaloo, 2010

... Click for larger view. Figure 9. "Long Live Proletarian Internationalism," Bole Roa... more ... Click for larger view. Figure 9. "Long Live Proletarian Internationalism," Bole Road at Meskel Square (1984) by Kebede Bogale. [End Page 128]. ... A neighborhood in the Arat Kilo area (2004) by Michael Tsegaye. Click for larger view. Figure 12. ...

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Callaloo, 2011

... in 1879 he died of pleurisy. Alemayehu was mourned by Queen Victoria, who even in her sorrow ... more ... in 1879 he died of pleurisy. Alemayehu was mourned by Queen Victoria, who even in her sorrow remembered that she ought to have Alemayehu's body laid to rest outside and away from the main chapel at Windsor Castle. ...

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Book Reviews by Elleni Centime Zeleke

Journal of African History, 2022

It is not every day that a historian witnesses, within their own lifetime, the resumption of even... more It is not every day that a historian witnesses, within their own lifetime, the resumption of events that the author might have thoughtor wishedwere confined to the archives. Yet in the past year this has come to pass for historians of Ethiopia, a country where the present has begun to resemble the past in shocking ways. The civil wars of the 1980s have returned, with basically the same protagonists acting out a script that seems already to have been performed: the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) battle the central government; agricultural land is destroyed by aerial bombardment; civilians are recruited into military units meant to preserve the integrity of the nation-state. Government spokespersons mouth rhetoric that could have been uttered four decades ago, while humanitarian personnel are named risks to national security. 1 Given all this, any look back at famine relief efforts from the era of Ethiopia's 1980s Civil War would be complicated, if not treacherous. Yet, this is precisely what Benjamin Talton does in his book In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics. And while the book was conceived, written, and published long before the current civil war broke out in November 2020, it has now arrived into just the right moment. Talton's book explores the social and political tensions of African American solidarity towards Africa in the 1980s. By considering what sense Black American internationalists do and do not make out of African affairs, the study helps clarify what is both new and old in the current conflict. The repetition of historical events also signals that history writing is risky and can reopen wounds that have not yet healed. Inadvertently, history can become part of the battlefield over meaning-making in a time of conflict. Mickey Leland was an African American lawmaker whose tenure in the US House of Representatives lasted from 1978 until his untimely death in Ethiopia in 1989. His path to Congress began with student activism in Houston's Black communities in the 1960s and 1970s, where his political convictions were forged in the fire of Black radicalism. Leland then spent six years in the Texas state legislature focusing on health care and related social justice issues. After moving to Congress, Leland chaired the Congressional Black Caucus, where he is best remembered

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Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016, Historical-Materialism Book Series, Brill and Haymarket Books, Vol 201. , 2019

Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, a... more 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?

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022

This essay outlines a research agenda the authors call “Third World Historical,” combining reflec... more This essay outlines a research agenda the authors call “Third World Historical,” combining reflections from Ethiopia and Iran to query the legacies of revolutionary politics in our present. Third world activists from the 1960s and 1970s engaged revolutionary talk to pose questions about the particularities of their immediate contexts, and they posed new concepts of revolution along the way. Congealed manifestations of the term revolution can preclude our effort to think the event as experience. If revolution signals the disruption of existing categories, can we in turn disrupt congealed categories to rethink revolution? What could it mean to reposition the question of revolution in the specificity of the third world, against the tendency to map revolutions as models, patterns, and stages?

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from... more This dialogue, recorded in 2021, explores the sound and feel of South-South political theory from the perspective of Southern Africa. The interlocutors discuss the question of violence and nonviolence in revolutionary change across generational divides. It centers the enduring place of spirit and ancestral voices in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

This dialogue, recorded in late 2020, brings together a group of remarkable critics and creators ... more This dialogue, recorded in late 2020, brings together a group of remarkable critics and creators working between Asia, Africa, and the West, each of whom address the relationship between revolutions and archives in their own practice. What does it mean, in practice, to unlearn the archive? What does it mean to do so from the global periphery, the still present specter of a third world?

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016, 2020

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2020

In a study of “transborder ex changes” be tween Mah dist Sudan and the king doms and principaliti... more In a study of “transborder ex changes” be tween Mah dist Sudan and the king doms and principalities in pres entday Ethiopia, Iris Seri-Hersch shows how the very no tion of a “bor der” was reshaped by both Tur co-Egyp tian and Eu ro pean im pe rial dy nam ics on the Af ri can con ti nent in the late nineteenth cen tu ry.1 Under Eu ro pean pres sure, the Tur co-Egyp tian ad min is tra tion in Cairo be gan to un der stand ter ri to ri al ity in Northeast Africa as both ef ec tive oc cu pa tion and the land where Mus lims lived, that is, as a place with a fixed cul tural iden ti ty. On the other hand, the princes, sheiks, and chiefs liv ing in what is now Sudan and Ethiopia were more concerned with “ef ec tive con trol”: the ca pac ity to or ga nize raids and col lect tax es. Any no tion of a bor der would have been un der stood as “an un defined zone extending into their neigh bors lands.”2 However, by around 1876 we find one Ethi o pian lead er, Yohannes IV, appropriating the idea of ...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

This article traces the story of how the intellectual culture and discourses that animated the Et... more This article traces the story of how the intellectual culture and discourses that animated the Ethiopian student movement in the 1960s and 1970s have continued to impact political processes in the country in the generations since. More specifically, it looks at how the legacy of the Ethiopian student movement influenced events during the country’s momentous 2005 elections. The essay further poses the question of how one can characterize and understand the influence of the social sciences on actual social forces in a particular historical context.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art, 2010

... Since the 1960s a number of artists have taken it upon themselves to paint their own version ... more ... Since the 1960s a number of artists have taken it upon themselves to paint their own version of a univer-sal yet Ethiopian mother under that title. These include Aleka Gebre Selassie Adil (1960) and Tesfaye Mandefro (1965). ... Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999). ...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Callaloo, 2010

... Click for larger view. Figure 9. "Long Live Proletarian Internationalism," Bole Roa... more ... Click for larger view. Figure 9. "Long Live Proletarian Internationalism," Bole Road at Meskel Square (1984) by Kebede Bogale. [End Page 128]. ... A neighborhood in the Arat Kilo area (2004) by Michael Tsegaye. Click for larger view. Figure 12. ...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Callaloo, 2011

... in 1879 he died of pleurisy. Alemayehu was mourned by Queen Victoria, who even in her sorrow ... more ... in 1879 he died of pleurisy. Alemayehu was mourned by Queen Victoria, who even in her sorrow remembered that she ought to have Alemayehu's body laid to rest outside and away from the main chapel at Windsor Castle. ...

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Journal of African History, 2022

It is not every day that a historian witnesses, within their own lifetime, the resumption of even... more It is not every day that a historian witnesses, within their own lifetime, the resumption of events that the author might have thoughtor wishedwere confined to the archives. Yet in the past year this has come to pass for historians of Ethiopia, a country where the present has begun to resemble the past in shocking ways. The civil wars of the 1980s have returned, with basically the same protagonists acting out a script that seems already to have been performed: the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) battle the central government; agricultural land is destroyed by aerial bombardment; civilians are recruited into military units meant to preserve the integrity of the nation-state. Government spokespersons mouth rhetoric that could have been uttered four decades ago, while humanitarian personnel are named risks to national security. 1 Given all this, any look back at famine relief efforts from the era of Ethiopia's 1980s Civil War would be complicated, if not treacherous. Yet, this is precisely what Benjamin Talton does in his book In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics. And while the book was conceived, written, and published long before the current civil war broke out in November 2020, it has now arrived into just the right moment. Talton's book explores the social and political tensions of African American solidarity towards Africa in the 1980s. By considering what sense Black American internationalists do and do not make out of African affairs, the study helps clarify what is both new and old in the current conflict. The repetition of historical events also signals that history writing is risky and can reopen wounds that have not yet healed. Inadvertently, history can become part of the battlefield over meaning-making in a time of conflict. Mickey Leland was an African American lawmaker whose tenure in the US House of Representatives lasted from 1978 until his untimely death in Ethiopia in 1989. His path to Congress began with student activism in Houston's Black communities in the 1960s and 1970s, where his political convictions were forged in the fire of Black radicalism. Leland then spent six years in the Texas state legislature focusing on health care and related social justice issues. After moving to Congress, Leland chaired the Congressional Black Caucus, where he is best remembered

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact