Module description
What is modernity? What is Eurocentrism? And how do we study the globalisation of literature and ideas?
The intellectual and literary traditions of the Horn of Africa will help us answer these important questions. In philosophy, for example, modernity has been generally identified with the rationalist philosophy of the Enlightenment. When students learn about the Enlightenment in school, the most recurring names are those of Kant, Locke, Voltaire, Hume - all European philosophers. But was the philosophy of the Enlightenment an exclusively European undertaking? Looking at Ethiopia, some scholars answered a firm no. Defying Eurocentric constructions of modernity, the seventeenth-century Ethiopian Zära Yaqob developed a rationalist philosophy which made scholars advance the hypothesis of an "African" or "global" Enlightenment.
This is only one of the many ways in which the Horn of Africa can help us rethink the recent "transnational turn" in the humanities. Through authors such as Zära Yaqob, we will question those Eurocentric conceptions of world literature that tend to divide the world into a Western "centre" and non-Western "peripheries". Against this model, we will review examples of how Ethiopians, far from being a passive and subservient "periphery", managed to strategically influence what Europeans thought of them, including leaving a permanent mark on the thought of "the most English of authors", Samuel Johnson. The critical debates about the first Ethiopian novel in Amharic, Lǝbb Wälläd Tarik ("Story of the Heart") by Afäwärq Gäbrä-Iyyäsus, have similarly put into question existing world literature frameworks.
We will explore these discussions in our weekly seminars, and more. The Horn of Africa has a lot to teach us also about cultural alienation, global power relations, and the relationship between colonialism and knowledge production.
Educational aims & objectives
The course uses sources from the Horn of Africa to interrogate the meaning of modernity. These debates are central to understand the intellectual roots of the recent "transnational turn" in the humanities and social sciences. World literature theories and global intellectual history are two disciplines that have emerged from such scholarly turn. In order to unpack the conceptual premises of the two disciplines, the module surveys theories of single vs. multiple modernities, comparing diffusionist models of the global with models based on co-constitution. The Horn of Africa perfectly illustrates some of these debates, since texts such as Zära Yaqob's seventeenth-century treatise Hatata ("Inquiry", "investigation") have been seen to undermine Eurocentric genealogies of modernity.