With Modernist Art in Ethiopia, Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis writes a powerful indictment of Ethiopian exceptionalism, a narrative that has for over a century positioned Ethiopia outside of African cultures and histories. Ethiopian exceptionalism, the author argues, has shaped and continues to shape scholarly approaches to the art of the Christian Ethiopia. Stylistic and aesthetic innovations are attributed to the fortuitous presence in Ethiopia of European artists, while the links between the Ethiopian Christian tradition and Islamic and African art have been regularly ignored. Ethiopian intellectuals themselves contributed to this conception. ‘Orientalism’, Giorgis reminds us, ‘is a joint project between those who produce and those who replicate’ (p. 19). Ethiopian art cannot be understood outside this politics of representation, and here the book makes an important methodological argument. Against the established formalistic way of looking at Ethiopian artworks, Giorgis looks at visual arts and artists in the broader context of intellectual history. Hence, her five chapters contain rich analyses of novels, poetry, newspapers and advertising, as well as an account of the relationship between artists, writers and cultural institutions.

In tackling 20th century Ethiopian intellectual history, the book is structured around one core argument. Even at the height of Ethiopian modernism in the 1960s, Ethiopian intellectuals neglected to engage with the epistemic power relations of a world dominated by European colonialism and its aftermaths. European colonial institutions promoted globally certain types of knowledge branded as ‘European’, and delegitimised types of knowledge branded as ‘other’. Despite being themselves marginalised by Western racist and Eurocentric discourse, many Ethiopian intellectuals embraced those same ideologies and aesthetics of modernity. Ethiopia was not colonised, yet its nationhood and nationalism were shaped by colonialism, starting from the 1896 victory at Adwa against the Italians. And yet, the colonial character of modernity has been ignored by Ethiopian artists and intellectuals precisely ‘under the pretext that Ethiopia has never been colonized’ (p. 296). As a consequence of this, Giorgis shows, many Ethiopians did not identify with blackness and anticolonial struggles, and Ethiopian artists ‘failed to challenge the prejudices of the European modern … that refused to admit into its history the range of cultural practices that emanated from the non-West’ (p. 129).

From this point of view, the book takes a nuanced stance in what has been a heated dispute in Ethiopian intellectual history: the ‘alienation debate’. In parallel with a return of decolonial theory in academia and calls to ‘decolonise’ knowledge, recent scholarship on Ethiopia has either stressed the intellectual agency of Ethiopians on the global stage, or conversely decried the cultural dislocation and internalised Eurocentrism of twentieth century Ethiopian intellectuals, especially the Marxist students of the 1960s. Modernist Art in Ethiopia adds complexity to this debate in two ways. First of all, it encourages readers to recognise that the artists of the 1960s, in their critique of domestic authoritarianism, did articulate powerful visual narratives of freedom and justice, even if they fell short of relating them to colonial discourse. Second, this was not the case for all artists: Skunder Boghossian, in his radical hybridisation of the aesthetics of Pan-Africanism, African-American jazz, French surrealism, and Ethiopian religious art, created artworks able to richly illustrate the ‘coloniality of our noncolonized land’ (p. 7), bringing Ethiopia back into dialogue with black and African subaltern modernisms.

Elizabeth Wolde Giorgis calls her book ‘a provocation to broaden research’ (p. 108), and indeed she pays homage, in the Acknowledgements and Conclusion, to a new generation of Ethiopian scholars who are leading the way in confronting Ethiopian coloniality. Within scholarship on Ethiopia, though, she laments that the intellectual contribution of art and artists is still largely neglected. A crucial question to explore in the future of the discipline, for example, would be to interrogate Ethiopian coloniality within Ethiopia's own borders, with reference to what she calls the ‘Semitic-centred exclusivist malaise’ (p. 296), asking how Ethiopian artists acknowledged, perpetuated or challenged the public marginalisation of non-Christian artistic traditions, as well as the role that non-Christian traditions have played and continue to play in the ongoing building and rebuilding of Ethiopian modernity.