Abstract

This thesis takes issue with Ethiopian Studies (stuck as it is in an Orientalist-Semiticist paradigm) as well as acultural models for theorizing modernity and development. Rather, this thesis seeks to build a method that can shed light on the conditions of possibility of modern Ethiopia, especially in the post-revolutionary period (1974). This thesis has found that following Walter Benjamin's notion of dialectical images is the best way to go about building this kind of a method. As such, it attempts to build dialectical images of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Further, the confrontation of modernity with the local, as discerned in these images is read as emblematic of a larger process of what Ethiopia is currently confronted with as it attempts to become more modern and more developed. The idea that modernity is dead or on the contrary that it never arrived in the "periphery" (two sides of the same coin) is left to rest in the popular literature. Rather, it is the point of this thesis to show that modernity's story, far from being over, may just now be reaching its apex.