Literary networks in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

In his 1971 study on Four African Literatures, Albert Gerard states that ‘no imaginative literature seems to have been produced in any of the non-Amharic vernaculars of Ethiopia’ so that ‘the phrase Amharic literature can legitimately be used as a synonym for Ethiopian literature’. A methodology is focused on networks allow to move beyond the nation as a unit of analysis. While national literary histories have rigidly assumed that state borders coincide with literary borders, an approach based on networks, in Vilashini Cooppan’s words, ‘allows to highlight the principle of circulation, sedimentation, and linkage; distinct objects such as languages, cultures, identities, and aesthetic forms that move rhizomatically’. Ethiopian emperors ruled for centuries over a highland territory that was for the large part Orthodox Christian, but with sizeable Muslim and Jewish minorities. In this area, from the beginning of the Solomonic dynasty in 1270 until the late nineteenth century, education revolved around centres of religious learning.