The political past haunts Ethiopia while it is facing the future with optimism and hope. The contributors in this edition examine historical and contemporaneous issues with different lenses, highlighting the multiplicity and complexity of the contradictions that define traditional and modern Ethiopia.

European and African works have found it difficult to move past the image of Africa as a place of exotica and relentless brutality. This book explores the status and critical relationship between politics, culture, literary creativity, criticism, education and publishing in the context of promoting Africa's indigenous knowledge, and seeks to recover some of the sites where Africans continue to elaborate conflicting politics of self-affirmations. It both acknowledges and steps outside the protocols of analysis informed by nationalism, differentiating the forms that postcolonial theories have...