Strategic Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2007

Disciplines

African History | Political Science | Rhetoric | United States History

Abstract

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 inspired grass roots political activism in black America. To understand how this foreign policy issue became such a pressing domestic concern for black Americans, this essay analyzes an influential interpretation of the crisis, a pamphlet by J. A. Rogers entitled The Real Facts About Ethiopia. I argue that Rogers's text critiques the nature of race under colonialism by illustrating how state boundaries and racial categories are coordinate, strategic operations of colonial power. Second, I demonstrate how the text contrasts this parochial racial context with an alternative framework in which identity can be performed, a heterogeneous space represented by a characterization of Ethiopia. I contend that this figure of Ethiopia creates a temporal frame for remedying the geographic and historical dispersal of the African Diaspora. At the close of the 1930s, this anticolonial, transnational black identity influenced the tenor and focus of black political culture.

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