Imagining And Performing Habasha Identity

This dissertation examines Ethiopians' reinvention and performance of the racially ambivalent Habasha identity in Washington, D.C. as a creative response to the disempowering implications of blackness. It addresses Habasha's entanglement in the political economic hierarchies of America by focusing on how everyday and symbolic performances enable or disable Ethiopians' desire to fit into the molds of dominant American discourses of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. The Habasha seek to establish their prestige through ritualized re-enactments of Judeo-Christian heritage and phenotypic markers that they stage in different spaces such as churches, restaurants, coffee shops, stadiums, fashion catwalks, museums, and so forth.