07.05.2024Ethiopian Protest Music

Asebe Regassa’s recent publication on "The Conversation" unpacks the political geography of protest music in Ethiopia, and how the subaltern resorts to music to defy authoritarianism, land dispossession, and displacement. The piece was drawn from Asebe’s other article that also analyses the spatiality and temporality of land dispossession in Ethiopia’s Oromia region as subtly described through three selected songs of the late artist Hachalu Hundessa who was assassinated in 2020. In these studies, Asebe analyzes not only the texts in the lyrics but also the audio-visual representations of spaces and their contextual meanings. Both papers show that in authoritarian political contexts such as Ethiopia where the space for overt protest is often risky, music serves as a technology of defiance often in a subtle way. 

Publication on "The Conversation"

Full article on Taylor & Francis Online

Reference
Regassa, A. (2023). Jirra: Oromo protest songs as weapons of resistance against domination in Ethiopia. African Identities, 1-18.