The Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), founded as a small guerrilla movement in 1974, became the leading party in the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). After decades of civil war, the EPRDF defeated the government in 1991, and has been the dominant party in Ethiopia ever since. Its political agenda of federalism, revolutionary democracy and a developmental state has been unique and controversial. Drawing on his own experience as a senior member of the TPLF/EPRDF leadership, and his unparalleled access to internal documentation, Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe identifies the organizational, political and sociocultural factors that contributed to victory in the revolutionary war, particularly the Front's capacity for intellectual leadership. Charting its challenges and limitations, he analyses how the EPRDF managed the complex transition from a liberation movement into an established government. Finally, he evaluates the fate of the organization's revolutionary goals over its subsequent quarter-century in power, assessing the strengths and weaknesses the party has bequeathed to the country. Laying the Past to Rest is a comprehensive and balanced analysis of the genesis, successes and failings of the EPRDF's state-building project in contemporary Ethiopia, from a uniquely authoritative observer.

A penetrating look at the South African transition and what is wrong with it, by a prominent commentator

The theme of this work is essentially appreciative of life, a little dive into history--Africa as it is. Some parts of this work describe the brutal and transient nature of life while other parts simply focus on emotions and the common philosophies of life.

In recent years digital technology has made available an inconceivably vast archive of old media. Images of the past--accessed with the touch of a finger--are now intertwined with those of the present, raising questions about how visual culture affects our relationship with history and memory. This collection of new essays contributes to a growing debate about how the past and its media are appropriated in the modern world. Focusing on a range of visual cultures, the essays explore the intersection of film, television, online and print media and visual art--platforms whose boundaries are increasingly hard to define--and the various ways we engage the past in an environment saturated with the imagery of previous eras. Topics include period screen fiction, nonfiction media histories and memories, cinematic nostalgia and recycling, and the media as both purveyors and carriers of memory.

How Black Atlantic literature can challenge conventions and redefine literary scholarship Abolition Time is an invitation to reenvision abolitionist justice through literary studies. Placing critical race theory, queer theory, critical prison studies, and antiprison activism in conversation with an archive of Black Atlantic literatures of slavery, Jess A. Goldberg reveals how literary studies can help undo carceral epistemologies embedded in language and poetics. Goldberg examines poetry, drama, and novels from the nineteenth century through the twenty-first—such as William Wells Brown’s The Escape, Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen—to consider literature and literary scholarship’s roles in shaping societal paradigms. Focusing on how Black Atlantic literature disrupts the grammar of law and order, they show how these texts propose nonlinear theories of time that imagine a queer relationality characterized by care rather than inheritance, property, or biology. Abolition Time offers a framework for thinking critically about what is meant by the term justice in the broadest and deepest sense, using close reading to inform the question of abolishing prisons or the police and to think seriously about the most fundamental questions at the heart of the abolitionist movement.