Afterword – The Black Box of Eritrean Futurity

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Sabine Mohamed

Abstract

In summarising the contributions of the present issue this brief afterword considers our understanding of futurity in Eritrea. It describes how politics both inside and outside of Eritrea are in many ways harnessed by a mode of representationalism that is immersed in discarding and signifying particular historical events, and marking notable political struggles as improper, seemingly with an oddly foreclosed future in mind. Secondly, it highlights the institutional apparatus of the Eritrean president Isaias Afewerki as something of a black box. While the internal workings of the regime remain opaque, it is increasingly generative for the longevity of his leadership and an exclusive framing of “Eritreanness.” Yet, this afterword suggests that futurity in Eritrea is contingent on those illegible events and subjects that remain unaccounted for – nevertheless, perhaps contained somewhere in that “black box” of contemporary Eritrean governance.

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How to Cite
Mohamed, S. (2022). Afterword – The Black Box of Eritrean Futurity. Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.26806/modafr.v10i1.418
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Articles
Author Biography

Sabine Mohamed, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, United States of America

She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany (2021). Her current book project, “Losing Ground: Emergent Black Empire and Counter-Futures in Urban Ethiopia,” ethnographically explores how categories of blackness and race, as well as experiences of urban and national dispossession, are attached to an infrastructure of emergent empire in East Africa. She is convenor of the Network for Contemporary Anthropological Theory (http://www.anthrotheory.net) and also works on Afrofuturism, Eritrean-Ethiopian relations, and affect.