Black Empire and Infrastructures of Deportation in Ethiopia

Imperialism continues to shape our contemporary multipolar world, yet it often remains confined to the logics and parameters of Euro-American dominance. This talk describes black imperialism in Africa. It explores how one of the largest landlocked countries in the world, Ethiopia, emerged as a black maritime empire post-World War II - paradoxically during the height of Pan-Africanism and anti-colonial movements on the continent. Using both archival and ethnographic material, I examine the investment on port infrastructure on the shores of the Red Sea from the 1940s onward, as well as the afterlives of a 1998 mass deportation of people identified as of Eritrean origin and their return to Addis Ababa in the 2000s as gestures of contemporary empire-making. I describe how Eritrea and Eritreans remained articulated within Ethiopian national imagination as an epic love affair and a site of eternal return - part of a new imperial imaginary that is thoroughly infrastructural and technologically orientated.

Speaker: Sabine Mohamed, Johns Hopkins University