Zeleke, Elleni Centime (2019). Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964–2016. Historical materialism book series, 1570–1522, 201: Leiden–Boston, MA: Brill (281 pp.). ISBN: 978-9-004-41475-4.

Abstract

Zeleke’s Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 attempts to rescue Marxism from the post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism while discussing the intellectual history of the ideas animating the Ethiopian student movement (ESM). Utilizing concepts drawn from third world Marxism and mainstream western social science in service of an emancipatory anticolonial and anticapitalistic revolutionary project in Ethiopia, she argues that historical materialism and the tradition of critical social theory that largely shaped the ESM’s anti-colonial and anti-capitalist political project in Ethiopia does not warrant the categorical rejection of western social sciences as simple instruments of colonial domination. Zeleke also largely excludes critical literature produced on this area about and by Somali, Sidama, Eritrean, Oromo, nationalist scholars, thus, reproducing the core percept of Ethiopian exceptionalism which Zeleke sought to critique in the first place. Steeped in the framework of “the West against the rest,” Zeleke’s analysis fails to give due regard to the fact that the Ethiopian state itself is a site of struggle in which different sides appropriate and deploy Western categories of knowledge to gain visibility and intelligibility in the global nation-state system. Despite engagement with key postcolonial thinkers on knowledge production, Zeleke seems to reduce the problem with western social science global south to the larger discussion on the epistemologies, failing to adequately define what she meant by knowledge, knowledge production and decolonizing knowledge etc. This is contradictory logic could hardly explain what actually produced the whole lot of cataclysms in this region, the Red Terror, among other historical examples. Nevertheless, Zeleke’s creative work which explores the nexus between the intellectual history of the Ethiopian revolution and the larger struggle on knowledge and the Social Science in Africa makes it relevant to a wide range of scholars in the social sciences and humanities.