CRITICAL THEORY | SOCIAL ANALYSIS | POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
The following is the second of a four-part series. The first can be found here, the second here, the third here. Resisting Fragmented and Hegemonic Identities through Subjective In-Betweenness and Religions Postcolonial theorists define identities to resist homogenizing and fragmenting imposed identities. I aim to show how Ethiopians could resist imported and imposed identities through subjective in-betweenness. Subjective […]
The following is the second of a four-part series. The first can be found here, the second here. Churches in Africa do not question the postcolonial and neocolonial imagination of tribes in Africa; instead, using the example of Rwanda, they “reproduce the same tribalization and racialization of the Rwandan society as the colonial and neocolonial politicians.”67 […]
The following is the second of a four-part series. The first can be found here. In November 2020, war erupted between the Ethiopian federal government led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the TPLF (the party in the Tigray region; TPLF stands for Tigrayan People Liberation Front). The Ethiopian government accused the TPLF of attacking […]
The following is the first of a four-part series. Neoliberalism as Biopolitics In this essay I claim that imposed religious and political ideologies colonize Ethiopian bodies. I will use Michael Foucault’s biopolitics and the Ethiopian political theologian Theodros Teklu’s fictive Amhara identity or homo aEthiopicus to interpret the elimination of in- between spaces in the […]
The following is the second installment of a two-part series. The first can be found here. Privilege Production of Impasse – The case of the Deadlock Between Radical Feminists and Trans Activists In February 2015, a letter titled “We cannot allow censorship and silencing of individuals” was published in The Guardian, signed by several academics […]
“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” – Karl Marx “the late modern liberal subject quite literally seethes with ressentiment.” – Wendy Brown The following is the first of a two-part series. Prologue At the UK-based National Campaign Against Fees And Cuts (NCAFC) annual conference, […]
As Raidió Teilifís Éireann reported on January 23, 2020, the Doomsday Clock was moved to 100 seconds until midnight. The clock’s timekeepers, all members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, adjusted the clock forward by twenty seconds, a symbolic gesture indicating the world is closer than ever to a human-caused catastrophic event. Maintained since 1947, the […]
In my previous post, I took a turn from direct analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment to engage with David Scott’s writing on tragic disposition in Conscripts of Modernity. I then focused on Emmanuel Levinas’s early essay, “Reality and Its Shadow.” I merged Levinas’s pessimism concerning art and his call for a distinctive kind of criticism with […]
It is easy to debate the usefulness of commenting on the 2019 State of the Union Address. In a media sphere mostly concerned with who said what in a fleeting instance, what is the importance of the decorum and epideictic rhetoric surrounding the occasion of the State of the Union and its “strength”? Donald Trump […]
There was a moment in a universe long, long ago and far, far away – specifically, in February, 1980 when I and my now deceased ex-wife attended a “precinct” meeting in Denver of the newly founded Citizens Party – that instilled in me the inescapable realization how democracy invariably dies by distinction. Presumably, there are […]