Black Land: Imperial Ethiopianism and African America by Nadia Nurhessein (review)

First things first. This is solid, professional, archive-based scholarship that weaves together close textual analysis and finely attenuated social history in order to take a deep dive into a plainly overlooked aspect of African American cultural production: the relationship between African American writers and the empire of Ethiopia from the 1860s through the 1930s, with a focus on the period of the New Negro. Its title is a bit misleading—the Ethiopia in question isn't so much that of the messianic, millennialist, and pseudomythic Biblical Ethiopianism familiar to students and believers of Black Christian eschatology, but rather the literal East African country of Ethiopia—but that's this book's hook. While plenty of scholars have explored the role "Ethiopia" has played in Afrocentric liberation theology—"Princes shall come out of Egypt," says Psalm 68:31; "Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God"—Nurhussein focuses on the actual historical Ethiopia and shows the complicated and often contradictory attitudes Black writers in the US had toward it, especially during the period of both American and Ethiopian imperial expansion. Nurhussein uncovers a wealth of forgotten and fascinating material and lays out an analysis that details, in her words, "the paradox of this brand of black transnationalism and diasporic nostalgia: it built itself around the example of Ethiopia while also holding democratic ideals" (14).

Fantasies of African royalty have long been foundational to visions of Black liberation—from Afrocentric imaginings of ancient Black pharaohs to Black Panther's Wakanda—but, needless to say, these fantasies rarely address the political realities of a monarchical government, much less its downsides, and Nurhussein brings a welcome reality check to the Hotep Fantastic. It opens at the moment of the historical inception of modern Ethiopia in 1867 and tracks American literary responses to the founding of a Black African empire in the historical moment that is at once the dusk of slavery and the dawn of the scramble for Africa. "As a model," Nurhussein writes, "the nation provides a way to imagine a network of black peoples, led by a black emperor" (13–15). The paradox of this "imperial Ethiopianism," she explains, is that the democratic ideals of American writers, both white and Black, while wanting to celebrate the possibilities of a Black nation, often ran smack up against the explicitly military imperialism of the newly centralized African empire—founded in response to the explicitly military imperialism of Great Britain and Italy, and itself responsible for crimes of violence against its own Black inhabitants—and thus produced a range of confused and contradictory responses.

This is an extremely focused book, and it's both better and worse off because of it. Nurhussein opens her book with some table-setting in the intro that is bound to be the most useful for most readers and then pivots to her case studies. From this initial period of Ethiopia's birth in the 1860s, Nurhussein moves to Pauline Hopkins's 1903 novel Of One Blood and devotes other chapters to the waves of popular-culture reactions of the fame of Haile Selassie, to the careers of opportunistic American adventurers Harry Foster Dean and William Henry Ellis, and to the history of "Ethiopian imposters": the intertwined traditions of both African Americans and white people pretending to be Ethiopian travelers, including Virginia Woolf and her participation in the notorious Dreadnought hoax of 1910, all set against the backdrop of visual representations of late nineteenth-century imperial Abyssinia. The bulk of the book, though, is centered on the Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s: George Schuyler's Ethiopian Murder Mystery of 1935 and Revolt in Ethiopia of 1938–1939 get a chapter, as does Claude McKay's recently rediscovered novel Amiable with Big Teeth, alongside a clutch of poems by Langston Hughes. The reasons for this focus are plain enough: the figure of "Ethiopia" has been a constant motif in Black literature since the nation's founding; the...