Search Results

This chapter explores the reception of black and blackface minstrelsy outside of the USA. Europeans first acquired knowledge of the music-making of African Americans through the distorting medium of blackface minstrelsy. The reaction to the early minstrel troupes in the 1840s, however, was not one of uniform praise in Britain and often entailed some unease. To win approval, blackface performers stressed the wholesomeness of their entertainment. The Ethiopian Serenaders made their first London appearance at the prestigious Hanover Square Rooms, and their status was assured when they were invited to perform before Queen Victoria. Although blackface minstrels did appeal to British working-class audiences, the big London troupes always had a bourgeois audience more firmly in their sights, thus leaving a cultural space to be occupied by music hall. In contrast, minstrelsy remained the most popular form of urban working-class entertainment in America until the rise of vaudeville in the 1880s.

The first chapter lays out the ancient basis for the claims for exceptionality of the Ethiopian highlanders who call themselves the Habesha, from their ancient empires through their early modern ones. The historical record indicates not only that the Habesha have been central to world history, but also that they have been engaged for millennia in convincing powerful outsiders to recognize and respect them.

This chapter details the Habesha discourse that Johnson encountered and forwarded when translating A Voyage to Abyssinia. The first type is argumentative, having to do with claims that the Habesha made about their religion, ethnic neighbors, and legends. The second type of Habesha discourse is expressive, having to do with the “characters” who appear in the text.

The previous three chapters argued that Johnson’s experience of translating A Voyage to Abyssinia during a period of spiritual and emotional turmoil opened him to certain African representations. This chapter analyzeshow Johnson’s tragedy Irene is animated bytheHabesha discourse that inhabits A Voyage to Abyssinia. Although Irene’s plot may seem far from that of A Voyage to Abyssinia, both texts strikingly emphasize the conversion of oriental Christian women.

In this chapter and the next, the purpose is not to curtail any of the ongoing scholarly discussions of Rasselas. Rather, the purpose is to lay next to them a reading of Rasselas as, paradoxically and impossibly, a Habesha text. This chapter argues that the text is partly animated by Habesha discourse and therefore is partly African. Positing Rasselas as an energumen, a text through which others speak, is not a way to diminish Rasselas, but to open up new ways of reading it, readings that focus on the extraordinary connections this text has to other traditions, in particular African discourse and self-representations.

Stephen Johnson focuses on the interlacing gender and racial implications of a moment of cross‐dressing in the career of the black minstrel performer William Henry Lane, known as “Juba.” Surrounded by white men in blackface singing “Lucy Long” on an 1848 tour of England by the Ethiopian Serenaders, Lane must have presented an unusual challenge to the British middle classes. Working from descriptions of Juba by journalists of the time, including Charles Dickens, and calling on theories of cross‐dressing by Marjorie Garber and of minstrelsy by Eric Lott and W. T. Lhamon, Johnson considers this particularly dexterous “wench dance” as a possibly confusing and distracting performance that could have displaced for the moment prevailing prejudices against color.

Any archaeological study of slavery in the Horn of Africa (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia) must take two factors into account: first, the paucity of archaeological evidence for this system, which is historically attested as being of immense economic importance in the Aksumite and post-Aksumite period; and second, that the ‘social memory’of slavery within the modern Ethiopian psyche has fuelled an ethnohistorical — potentially racist — dichotomy between the ‘Semitic’ highlands and the ‘Cushitic’ lowlands. This dichotomy also broadly mirrors a religious Christian/Muslim separation. This chapter argues that although apparently archaeologically invisible, the long history of slavery within this region of Africa has left a profound and legible cultural imprint upon its peoples and landscapes.

The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis), at about 20 kg, differs from such typical, medium-size canids as the coyote (Canis latrans) in its unusually long legs and a long muzzle. Restricted to rodent-rich Afroalpine habitat within the Ethiopian highlands, its diurnal habits and distinctive coat render this species conspicuous. Field studies of Ethiopian wolves began in 1988, with a focus on the Bale Mountains. Conservation and research activities continue in Bale and have recently expanded to other populations in Ethiopia. This chapter analyses data previously presented.

The Apophthegmata Patrum has come down to us in two basic forms: the Alphabetical Collection and the Systematic Collection. The Alphabetical Collection gathers some 1,000 sayings and brief narratives under the names of 130 prominent monks and arranges these according to the Greek alphabet. This chapter focuses on the Alphabetical Collection, whose poignant anecdotes—like a set of snapshots in a photo album—offer striking portraits of leading desert fathers. This chapter explores the Apophthegmata’s portraiture of four figures from Scetis: Abba Macarius the Egyptian, Abba John the Little, Abba Moses the Ethiopian, and Abba Poemen.

The introduction delineates models of transcultural contact and notes their limits. It then lays out the model of discursive possession and textual energumens, addresses possible challenges to the model, and provides two instructive examples of spirit possession from West and East Africa. Finally, it addresses the vexed terms “Africa,” “Europe,” “Ethiopia,” and the “Habesha” (the name of the people of the highlands of modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea who are the focus of this book) and describes how the terms are used.

This chapter describes Johnson’s experience of translating A Voyage to Abyssinia during a period of mental illness, which resulted in his discursive possession. The chapter analyzes how the multiple conflicting sources of the textwould have contributed to such.

Johnson was drawn to Voyage historique d'Abissinie, this chapter proposes, by its African Christianity. That is, translating it was a way of thinking about what it meant to be a Christian and how differently Christianity could be imagined. That Johnson’s interest in the text was that of a religious explorer becomes clear when examining his reading, his religious beliefs, and his editing of Voyage historique d'Abissinie.

Johnson wrote many “oriental tales” over the same decade he wrote Rasselas, in the 1750s. Most appear to contain details that rise from Johnson’s reading about the Habasha. Some of the Habesha details in Johnson’s tales are mere geography or nomenclature, yet the amalgam of resemblances suggests a deep resonance, one informed by Habesha self-representations.

Why is Rasselas so strange? It is the argument of this chapter that this is so at least partly because of Samuel Johnson’s strange relationship with the literature about the Habesha. While, of course, Rasselas does appropriate and misrepresent the Habesha, it is also an instance of the power of Africandiscourse to co-constitute the representations of the English canon. In the previous chapters have explored loaned words and images from the Habesha that appeared in Johnson’s fiction. In unpacking the relationship of Rasselas to Johnson’s reading about the Habesha, however, this chapter focuses on the more profound influences onRasselas of Habesha discourse.

This chapter places emphasis on the legacy of violent liberation war in both Ethiopia and Eritrea since the early 1990s. The chapter is concerned with the institutionalization of violence in the modern states of the region, manifest in the successor movements to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)in Ethiopia and the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF)in Eritrea. The authoritarianism of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, and the ongoing utility of ethnicity as organizational tool, is explored, as is the militarism at the heart of Eritrea as a ‘frontier state’. Continuing conflict, most dramatically in terms of Oromo nationalist violence, wars in Somalia and their regional implications, and the recent war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, is examined in terms of both historical pattern and carefully crafted notions of destiny.