From the Editor

This issue of NEAS features four contributions by both established scholars and a new generation of researchers in our field. Three of the four articles focus on different aspects of history, society, politics, and culture in Eritrea. But first, Hagar Salamon offers a rich historical and ethnographic exploration of the well-known, yet surprisingly unstudied, Ethiopian commensal practice known as gursha (the custom of feeding a person by placing food in their mouth). Drawing on a broad range of written sources and interviews in Ethiopia, Salamon conceptualizes gursha as a "dominant gesture" and a medium in a wide array of intersecting social, religious, and affective relational dynamics and associations. In the first of three contributions on Eritrea, Ruth Iyob applies multidisciplinary lenses to survey and critique a composite of colonial (1890–1941) and nationalist (1941–91) images and iconic representations of Eritrean women as symbols of the country/nation. She aptly argues that these layers of images produced discourses that obscured the lived historical experiences and aspirations of Eritrean women in all their ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity. Biyan Ghebreyesus Okubaghergis explores the dynamics of everyday life of borderland communities on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border between Eritrea's secession from Ethiopia (1991) and the eruption of the border conflict with Ethiopia (1998). Situating this case in the broader literature on borderlands and drawing on fieldwork research conducted on the Eritrean side of the border, Biyan explores a wide range of social, economic, and cultural cross-border interactions and relationships that, he argues, were mostly maintained despite the political boundary dividing the two countries. Finally, in a contribution focusing on visual culture in Eritrea, Yonatan Tewelde examines the influence of modern European Christian imagery on the iconography of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church of Eritrea. Based on examples from a number of churches in Eritrea, Yonatan analyzes shifts in religious iconography that articulate racial hierarchies and that reflect ideological underpinnings associating blackness with evil and sin and white skin with superiority.

The review section in this issue reflects the breadth of scope and the wide range of disciplinary approaches in our field. The eight books reviewed include a collection of essays on cinema in Ethiopia; a detailed history and analysis of the Egyptian occupation of Harar in the late nineteenth century; an ethnography of local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian community; a cultural history of Italian colonialism and anticolonialism; a firsthand account of the first seven months of the Derg, the military junta that brought down Haile Selassie and the Ethiopian empire; a study of the lived experiences of Ethiopian refugees living in Nairobi; a fascinating reconstruction of the experiences of sixty-four Oromo children who were enslaved in Ethiopia and, after liberation, sent to South Africa; and, finally, an edited collection that brings together essays analyzing various dimensions of international, regional, national, and local affairs in the Horn of Africa.

NEAS readers can look forward to our next issue (20:1-2), featuring an exciting collection of articles in the special issue "From Subjecthood to Citizenship in the Horn of Africa," guest edited by Nicola Camilleri and Alexander Meckelburg.

Finally, I'd like to thank our article contributors, book reviewers, and peer reviewers for their commitment and dedication to innovative and rigorous scholarship on northeast Africa. As always, we welcome suggestions for special issues as well as individual submissions.