• PARTICIPATING SCHOLARS
• PROGRAM
• CONTACT
• SPONSORS
• INFORMATION FOR VISITORS
• INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION:  
The Africana Studies and Research Center here at Cornell, will host a symposium to generate research and papers related to the photographic archive of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies. The symposium aims to promote a dialog between African and African Diaspora specialists through an exploration of Ethiopia’s influential history ranging from its era of monarchs through to the contemporary modern.

Heavily weighted toward participants from Ethiopia, an important aim of the symposium, publication and subsequent exhibition is to provide interventions that can shed new light on Ethiopia’s heritage from an 'insider perspective'. Its panels are designed to challenge Western romanticized concepts of Ethiopia as well as examine conceptualizations of the Black Diaspora related to black nationalism and Pan-Africanism in the past century. Ethiopia’s contributions to black culture within the framework of Afro-centrism are revisited.

The symposium also considers Ethiopia's contribution to past and present ideas about modernity, even with all its societal contradictions regarding ethnic xenophobia, religion, famine and war. Contemporary theories about African unity will be explored to see how Ethiopia figures in current debates around identity and identity politics and how it might offer a model for reconciliation and reparation in the region. The exchange is reciprocal, since there is much in Ethiopia’s history that contemporary audiences will find inspiring. At a time when diaspora communities the world over are searching for answers to the paradigms of modernity, globalization and African unity, a lot can be learned from the successes and failures of Ethiopia’s imperial and socialist agendas and its evocatively rich visual matrix.

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