Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center will host an international symposium, "Imaging Ethiopia: Monarchy and Modernity," April 20-21, at the center, 310 Triphammer Road. The symposium, funded with a $33,000 grant from the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, the Netherlands, will be presented in collaboration with the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. The event is free and open to the public.

"The symposium aims to promote a dialogue between African and African diaspora specialists," said Salah Hassan, Africana center director. "We plan to accomplish this through an exploration of Ethiopia's influential history, ranging from its era of monarchs through to the contemporary moderns."

Many of the program's participants hail from Ethiopia, and an important aim of the symposium and subsequent publication and exhibition is to provide points of view that can "shed new light on Ethiopia's heritage from an insider's perspective," Hassan said.

Among the speakers will be Richard Pankhurst, chairman of the Society of the Friends of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, and Demeke Berhane, chief archivist, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, both at Addis Ababa University.

According to Hassan, the symposium's panels will address Western romanticized concepts of Ethiopia as well as examine conceptualizations of the black diaspora related to black nationalism and Pan-Africanism in the past century. "Ethiopia's contribution to black culture within the framework of Afrocentrism will be revisited," he said.

The symposium's presenters also will consider "Ethiopia's contribution to past and present ideas about modernity, even with all its societal contradictions regarding ethnic xenophobia, religion, famine and war," said Hassan.

Contemporary theories about African unity also will be explored to see how Ethiopia figures in current debates around identity and identity politics and how it might offer "a model for reconciliation and reparation in the region." The exchange is reciprocal, since there is much in Ethiopia's history that contemporary audiences will find inspiring, Hassan noted.

"At a time when diaspora communities the world over are searching for answers to the paradigms of modernity, globalization and African unity, a lot can be learned from the successes and failures of Ethiopia's imperial and socialist agendas and its evocatively rich visual matrix," he said.

For more information see the Imaging Ethiopia Web site, http://www.asrc.cornell.edu/ethiopia07/.