Ph.D.
African and African American Studies
Harvard University
2021
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Faculty
Faculty
Amsale Alemu
Assistant Professor
Department/Office
- African Studies
School/College
- College of Arts & Sciences
Biography
Amsale Alemu is an assistant professor in the Department of African Studies at Howard University. She holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and A.M. in History from Harvard University. She teaches courses on higher education and social change; African political thought; decolonization and the Cold War; and gender theory and practice.
Her current book project examines revolutionary history, higher education, and U.S. geopolitics in the Horn of Africa, with attention to relationships among Ethiopian and Eritrean activists and anticolonial collaborators in the 1960s and 1970s. Her writing has been published in Radical History Review, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and The Global Ethiopian Diaspora (Boydell & Brewer). She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, and Fulbright-Hays Program.
Education & Expertise
Education
A.M.
History
Harvard University
2018
Academics
Academics
AFST 356 Education and Social Change in Africa
This graduate course interrogates African education– particularly higher education– as driver of social transformation, site of critical theory, and stage for protest histories. As momentum builds around movements to decolonize African higher education and to renew engagement between college campuses and liberatory activism, we will do an engaged multidisciplinary survey rooted in African Studies theory and methods. Reading both seminal texts and new works, our modules will include precolonial African university models and theories of knowledge, debates surrounding the university and development, and student movement case studies from Congo, Ethiopia, and South Africa. We will close with present debates about the politics of African higher education, including calls for decolonization, epistemic reparations, and monument destruction, thinking through the challenges and opportunities of imagining the African university as emancipatory project.
AFST 101 Introduction to Contemporary Africa
Related Articles
Clandestine Issues: Tracing US Imperialism across Ethiopian Revolutionary Papers
October 2024. Radical History Review. Issue 150.
To this day, materials surrounding the 1974 Ethiopian Revolution that live in the archives of Addis Ababa University are designated as “clandestine literature.” Their publication was a clandestine affair; critiquing the emperor of the then oldest Christian kingdom in the world and eventually professing Marxist thinking, they amounted to blasphemy. However, building an argument for Ethiopian revolution was premised on another heretical proposition: that Ethiopia, world-famous for having eluded European colonial rule, was a client state of US imperialism during the mid-century age of decolonization. This article employs a selection of Ethiopian revolutionary papers—including magazines, newspapers, and journals produced and distributed across Ethiopia, North America, and Europe—to provide a genealogy of “US Imperialism in Ethiopia,” a composite, hand-transcribed document of the late 1960s that has since been destroyed. Assembling materials marked by both their refutation of and proximity to US empire, this article argues that building the case for US imperialism in Ethiopia was a necessary step to clarify and link Ethiopian revolutionary struggle to anticolonialism. In the process, the article thinks with and extends the archival designation “clandestine” as both the conspiracy of alleging US imperialism in Ethiopia and an analytic for reading other transnational networks of revolutionary papers.
Exhuming the Narrative: Imagining Prince Alemayehu in Ethiopian Diaspora
Demystifying the Image: Anticolonial Concepts of the Ethiopian Revolution
August 2022. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME) 42, no. 2.
While opposition to the Ethiopian monarchy was an immediate imperative of the Ethiopian revolutionary movement, self-professed “anti-feudalism” was but one part of the political-economic object of revolutionary critique. Originating from a country famous for its legacy of African independence, and against a monarch who was a global pan-African icon, Ethiopian revolutionary opposition to Haile Selassie would require not only a politics of dissent, but also an anti-colonial framing. This article centers anti-imperialism—specifically challenges to US neo-imperialism in Ethiopia—among Ethiopian student revolutionaries in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Examining organizational writing and direct action, as well as editorials in Muhammad Speaks and The Black Panther, this article argues that US-based Ethiopian students employed demystification as a signature revolutionary tactic. They attempted to reframe Ethiopian exceptionalist narratives as currency of US neo-imperialism, drawing on arguments strengthened by engaging Black Power concepts and thinkers. Demystification, while rooted in narrative modes and historical tropes specific to Ethiopian students' location in the United States, offers a concept to think through other oppositional movements as generative of global theoretical critique. Ethiopian students not only demanded the overthrow of the monarchy, but also joined anti-colonial appeals for the structural transformation of the world.