Paper short abstract:

My paper aspires to rethink and reevaluate the attention Asmara has been getting lately. It attempts to rethink this newfound fame of postliberation Asmara as a form of colonial nostalgia and argues this desire reflects the ambiguity the local people feel to this revisionist, nostalgic view of Asmara.

Paper long abstract:

Recently, a number of books on Modernist Asmara have appeared in academic and popular circles. In these books, the city of Asmara is presented as a representative of the finest product of European imagination, creativity and civilization in Africa. In the pages of these books, the lived experiences of the people who call Asmara as their home are dearly missing. The people are almost invisible in the wonderful stories of the modernist Asmara. Why are the stories of the local people who live and worked in the city often missing? Why is Asmara described as an almost ghost city, with only relicts of the past looming large, but with vague mention of the human beings, colonizers and colonized, living in it? The irony is that the voiceless, but grateful natives are portrait as the loyal keepers of these sacred European wonders, even under stressful and the difficult times of war and revolution. In these narratives, the local people are placed on the background as silent inheritors/observers/benefactors of the modernist city's amenities. They are also in some ways complicit in collaborating to this glorification of fascist architecture and Italian rule in Africa, even proud of their association to it. My paper aspires to rethink and reevaluate the attention Asmara has been getting lately. It attempts to rethink this newfound fame of postliberation/independence Asmara as a form of colonial nostalgia and argues this desire reflects the ambiguity the local people feel to this revisionist, nostalgic view of Asmara.