Field and river

20th International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (ICES20)
Mekelle University, Ethiopia

"Regional and Global Ethiopia - Interconnections and Identities"
1-5 October, 2018

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KANT ON ETHIOPIA: RETHINKING RACISM IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AS A MEANS OF (RE-) CONCEPTUALIZING ITS DISCOURSES WITHIN ETHIOPIAN PHILOSOPHY [Abstract ID: 0513-14]

TSEHAYE Hailemariam, Founder of Virtual Dance Museum

One of the major Western philosophers heavily criticized for his racist views on the African continent is Immanuel Kant, which is by some explained with inherent connections between key-concepts of enlightenment and a new hierarchy constructed to separate peoples and cultures (see the critical studies by Gilman Sander 1975, 1992, Barkhaus 1993, Firla 1994, 1997, Smidt 1999). This was linked with the enlightenment's ambition to be able to better explain and understand any existing problem of the world, including differences between humans, in stark contrast with earlier positive views of Africans. As a recently rediscovered ethnological account by Kant shows us, however, he had, at least, a positive (or rather different) view of Ethiopia (Smidt, 2015). Building on this largely unknown account, this paper aims to discuss the historically rather recent invention of racism in several important streams of Western Philosophy, such as the Kantian enlightenment, in contrast to other streams of thinking (as put forward by the anthropological thinker Franz Boas, following Kant's intellectual foe Herder, one of the first to denounce Kant's racism already in the 18th century). The diversity of new racist concepts and counter-concepts from the 18th century, the surprising role of Ethiopia in these discussions, which was sometimes positively embraced by racists and sometimes victim of racism, will serve us as a means of Re(-conceptualizing) its discourses within Ethiopian Philosophy.