Conclusion

Summary

Three concepts organize the preceding papers that make up The Global Ethiopian Diaspora: migrations, connections, and belongings. This book, through its thirteen substantive chapters organized into three sections, offers a critical interrogation of each of these analytical frameworks. Although the issues covered here represent different thematic and theoretical orientations, not to mention their varied temporal and spatial foci, they are all woven together in a web of relationships to tell a complicated story of a modern human condition. This is a condition in which Ethiopians coming from all walks of life are engaged in a global process of mobility that unsettles existing assumptions about what is to be a migrant and a diaspora. Existing notions of culture, belonging, politics, identity, citizenship, and economy are not only destabilized but also rearticulated to capture the complexity, multiplicity, and fungibility of social reality. As such, the thirteen chapters inform and enrich each other, weaving a richly nuanced and deeply dynamic analysis of the multifaceted and plural experiences of Ethiopian migrants globally. The story is therefore a collection of multiple, intensely interconnected stories.

Amsale Alemu's “Exhuming the Narrative: Imagining Prince Alemayehu in the Ethiopian Diaspora” tells the fascinating yet heart-wrenching story of a mid-nineteenth-century Ethiopian prince, whose death at the age of eighteen could be said to have begun a painful but enriching conversation about exile, displacement, adoption, and historical restitution. His short life and the narratives around it, both hegemonic and subaltern, have engendered a perspective or perspectives to interrogate notions of belonging, agency, or lack thereof, and liminality. His past and his complicated experience spanning three worlds generated a narrative that many of his fellow modern Ethiopians summon to articulate their encounter with migration, exile, displacement, and adjustment. Alemu's chapter ties seamlessly with those that grapple with themes she raises, including adoption, repatriation, bifocality, and liminality. The final chapter in this collection, Kassaye Berhanu-Mac Donald's “Between Worlds: Ethiopian Adoptee Identity,” is a discussion, or rather a personal account, of suspended belongings and the in-betweenness that many migrants and members of diasporic communities must negotiate. As an adoptee herself, the author tells an inside story of dislocation through adoption at an early age but also because of her “exilic” existence for lack of a sense of rootedness.