Theatre, Politics and Society in Ethiopia: 1991-2017

该项目将涉及对1991年至2017年25年间国家宣传目标与专业戏剧制作之间关系的深入历史分析，并试图解释这种关系如何影响埃塞俄比亚戏剧的生产和接收。相比之下，本研究还将在更广泛的非洲背景下研究这种关系。该计划旨在研究政治结构和意识形态对剧院的影响，以及剧院对这种影响的反应。埃塞俄比亚新政府在经历了17年的内战（1974-1991）后于1991年上台，引入了以民族为基础的联邦制度，旨在充分承认民族自治，同时保持国家的统一（Alem, 2003）。以种族为基础的联邦制度旨在对该国各种族长期遭受的不平等作出反应。通过给予国内不同民族的政治包容权，政府引入了多民族民族主义，作为国家建设过程中的一种工具。然而，多民族民族主义项目并没有得到广泛的支持，因此执政党埃塞俄比亚人民革命民主阵线（以下简称EPRDF）开始利用艺术实践作为宣传这一理念的主要工具。政府利用非正式的审查制度和不同的控制机制，反对国家的宪法秩序，利用戏剧和表演艺术的潜力，宣传其多民族民族主义的政治意识形态。

This project will involve an in-depth historical analysis of the relationship between state propaganda objectives and professional theatre-making over a 25-year period, from 1991-2017, and tries to explicate how this relationship impacted the production and reception of theatre in Ethiopia. Comparatively, the research will also study such relationship in the broader African context. The plan is to examine the influence of political structure and ideologies on the theatre and the response of the theatres to such influences. The new government of Ethiopia that took power in 1991 after a seventeen-year civil war (1974-1991) introduced an ethnic-based federal system intending to give full recognition to ethnic autonomy, while maintaining the unity of the state (Alem, 2003). The ethnic-based federal system aimed at responding to the inequality that the country's various ethnicities had been long suffering from. By giving the right of political inclusion to different ethnic groups in the country, the government introduced a multi-ethnic nationalism which served as a tool in the nation-building process. However, the multi-ethnic nationalism project did not garner widespread support, and so the ruling party, the Ethiopian People Revolutionary Democratic Front (hereafter referred to as EPRDF), began to use artistic practices as major instruments of propaganda to promote the idea. The government used informal censorships and different controlling mechanisms, against the constitutional order of the country, to exploit the potentials of theatre and the performing arts to propagate its political ideology of multi-ethnic nationalism.