Famously never colonized by Europeans, Ethiopia has not only constituted a pivotal, if complex, imaginary in transatlantic histories of Blackness but has in turn been informed by them. In describing this tension, Sabine Mohamed moves between three ethnographic, historical, and infrastructural spaces: colonial legacies of urban planning, political visions of Addis Ababa as the renaissance capital city that encompasses the state, and, more centrally, young men and women on the economic and social sidelines of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.

This talk will address how racial configurations in East Africa, Italian colonial and contemporary forms of imperialism are not only localized, but tethered to the circulation of transatlantic and Indian ocean discourses on slavery, and indeed global forms of Blackness.