Afäwärḳ Gäbrä-Iyyäsus’s Tobbaya: The Girl Whose Stubborn Faith Helped Unite Ethiopia

This blog post is among the winners of the Department of Comparative Literatures’s 2020-2021 Blog Award for the module 6ABA0013 ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in Global Cultural Studies’. Congratulations to Molly Spears for winning the award! Have you ever read a novel originally written in Amharic? Have you ever consumed any fiction about nation-building in an …

Afawerk’s ‘Tobbya’: Ethiopia’s First Realist Novel or Simple Folktale?

This blog post is among the winners of the Department of Comparative Literatures’s 2020-2021 Blog Award for the module 6ABA0013 ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in Global Cultural Studies’. Congratulations to Giovanna Demopoulos for winning the award! For too long have critics of Afawerk Gabre Yesus’ Tobbya (1908) reduced it down to either a ‘folktale’ or tried …

What The ‘Hatata’ can Teach us About the Origin of Modernity

This blog post is among the winners of the Department of Comparative Literatures’s 2020-2021 Blog Award for the module 6ABA0013 ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in Global Cultural Studies’. Congratulations to Isabelle Ragnetti for winning the award! What do you think about when you think about the Enlightenment? I clearly remember one day in high school when …

Female agency, empire, and the first Amharic novel: Afevork Ghevre Jesus’ Tobbya

This blog post is among the winners of the Department of Comparative Literatures’s 2020-2021 Blog Award for the module 6ABA0013 ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in Global Cultural Studies’. Congratulations to Oliwia Majchrowska for winning the award! At the beginning of the twentieth century, the predominantly Christian and Amharic community of the Ethiopian highlands stands on the …

Modernity; What is it and who made it?

This blog post is among the winners of the Department of Comparative Literatures’s 2020-2021 Blog Award for the module 6ABA0013 ‘Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in Global Cultural Studies’. Congratulations to Gloria Luz Pajares Tamayo for winning the award! Britannica defines modernity as “the self-definition of a generation about its own technological innovation, governance, and socioeconomics”. Let’s …