Description:

Join the Program of African Studies as we provide lunch and a lecture.

Sara Marzagora, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, SOAS University of London

Title: Monarchical Nationalism in Ethiopia: Global Ideas of Sovereignty and the Reinvention of ‘Dynasty’ (1855-1941)

Abstract:

This paper traces the shift in the Ethiopian monarchical ideology from lineage as symbolic Christian filiation to dynasty as a political genealogy of sovereign power. From the end of the nineteenth century, and more prominently under Haylä Səllase, Ethiopian state sources started qualifying the Ethiopian ruling dynasty as ‘unbroken’ in history. A record of ‘uninterrupted’ power allowed the Ethiopian government to politically appropriate past glories and claim them as ‘ours’, thus compensating for the political weakness of the present with the political greatness of the past. The ideological rebranding of the Ethiopian monarchy in the 1930s brought Ethiopia closer to Japan, and the ‘eternalist clause’ of the Meiji constitution offered a powerful model of how to recodify dynasty in modern legal terms. An intellectual history of dynasty in the Ethiopian context sees the concept simultaneously associated with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political projects. The narratives of continuity enabled by the dynastization of history were successful in invigorating the pro-Ethiopian front during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936-1941), but served at the same time to reinforce domestic mechanisms of class, political and cultural domination.

Bio:

Dr Sara Marzagora is an intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at SOAS University of London, where she is leading the Horn of Africa strand of a research project on global intellectual history and world literature. She has published articles on Amharic historiography, Amharic print culture and Ethiopian political thought, and is completing a book manuscript on Ethiopian conceptualizations of the “global” in the first half of the twentieth century.