Revolution Beyond Redemption: U.S. Empire, Student Struggle, and Ethiopian Coloniality

Abstract

Revolution Beyond Redemption centers the writing and activism of Ethiopian students at U.S. universities to tell a history of the 1974 Revolution, which deposed Emperor Haile Selassie and ended Ethiopian imperial rule. This dissertation argues that a decolonizing politics was necessary to the project of Ethiopian revolution; originating from a country famous for its legacy of African independence, and pursuant with activists’ assertions about U.S. neo-imperialism in Ethiopia, such a politics would entail a new framework for Ethiopian coloniality. Making the case for an anti-imperial movement from a polity without a direct colonial legacy, and against a monarch considered a global symbol of Black sovereign independence, Ethiopian revolutionary thinkers transformed familiar categories of coloniality, troubling easy distinctions between anticolonial and revolutionary movement-making. This study focuses on the Ethiopian student movement in the United States because it operated within the country widely understood to be Ethiopia’s most powerful and involved foreign presence by mid-century. It also focuses on the student movement in the U.S. to give voice to the myriad collaborations and alliances, but also disputes and misapprehensions that occurred between Ethiopian revolutionaries and other progressive movements, particularly meaningfully with the Black Power left. Investigating multinational archives of student writing, union materials, oral history, newspapers, and visual material to provide a networked history of student struggle, this dissertation constellates Ethiopian political thought with Black American social and intellectual movements, Cold War geopolitics of higher education, U.S. surveillance, and contestations of race in global perspective. While state leaders negotiated new economic, military, and educational alliances that critics named neo-imperialist, Ethiopian students in the U.S. found themselves implicated in these power relationships by their very presence abroad. At the same time, their embeddedness in emerging local struggles for Black liberation made possible new frameworks for understanding their global position, historical subjectivity, and revolutionary potential. Investigating the United States as site and object of Ethiopian revolutionary thought, decades before the emergence of a U.S.-based Ethiopian diaspora, offers exciting dimensions to the relationship between Ethiopian coloniality, U.S. empire, and Black transnationalism.