Papers by Solomon Mekonen
Under Construction: Performing Critical Identity, 2021
I would like to express the deepest appreciation to the MDPI Book staff who made this book projec... more I would like to express the deepest appreciation to the MDPI Book staff who made this book project possible in the first place, namely the book series's editor Laura Wagner and the assistant editors Oliva Andereggen and Lea Schneider. Thank you for taking care so thoroughly of the concerns in the areas of lectorate and organization, and for your great patience, sensitivity and endurance throughout the process. Also, I want to thank all the peer reviewers who devoted their time and expertise to this volume. My greatest gratitude goes to the contributors of this book, without whose insights into their research work, innovative approaches and thorough analyses this book would not have become a book.
MDPI Books, 2021
This essay is an autoethnography of becoming Black. It engages my coming to terms with the fact t... more This essay is an autoethnography of becoming Black. It engages my coming to terms with the fact that I have been cornered, as it were, and forced to recognise myself as a being who is othered in a racial classification that was not consciously part of my self-identification before I came to study in Berlin. While exploring the phenomenology of Blackness in spaces where I find myself othered, I also draw a comparative outlook from domestic intercultural power relations in my country of origin, Ethiopia, where the ethnic group I belong to, the Amharas, do the othering. I argue, in my sense-making and ethnographic journey, that the ambiguity and intricacy of Blackness has granted me a redemptive stability in navigating the world and in demystifying the logic of my oppression as a newly profiled black person in Berlin and the logic of my cultural positioning as an oppressor in Ethiopia. The essay, as such, is an invitation for a reflection on the confluence of the two positions.
A look into Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda (2012) in the social context it was set in and beyond
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Papers by Solomon Mekonen