Recognizing that the beginning of the discourse of modern Ethiopian history is of urgent concern, this dissertation examines Ethiopian modernism’s strategy, its limits, structures of exclusion and the totality of this experience. Focusing on prominent artists who are widely believed to be the pioneers of Ethiopian modernism, this research reveals the discursive and philosophical limitations and drawbacks of Ethiopian modernism, and its interpretation in the Ethiopian imaginary. Engaging with nonWestern contexts of modernity, it interrogates modern Ethiopian art within the debates and parameters of African modernism, and thus establishes a space to analyze specific visual languages of Ethiopian modernist expressions. It evaluates how Ethiopian artists engaged principal questions of the meanings of Ethiopian culture within the matrix of modern art. In relation to such imperatives and concerns, this dissertation raises the following questions: How did the meanings of Ethiopian literary texts and popular languages perform in articulating Ethiopian modernity and modernism, and how did this discourse relate to the hegemonic narratives of Western modernity and modernism? How did these texts and languages manifest themselves in diverse temporal and spatial situations of Ethiopian modernism? How did power relations condition the production, dissemination and reception of these texts and linguistic expressions? By positing such questions, this dissertation not only examines the intellectual and cultural contexts of the making of Ethiopian modernity, but more importantly, looks at Ethiopian modernism along with its local and global trajectories and contentions. This research is also a first attempt in Ethiopian scholarship that historicizes the making of Ethiopian modernity and modernism from perspectives of discourses and cultural practices. It investigates the nature and parameters of Ethiopian modernity and modernism through the linguistic complexities of popular language and literature that play out in forms of collective expression and performance. Picking up on diverse, tenuous and culture specific notions of the production of discourse, such as the notion of the ‘nation’, it examines the texture of the beginning articulation of Ethiopian modernity and its subsequent trajectory. It explores Ethiopian modernity through a critical framework that intersects with local and global discourses of modernity. Consequently, it interrogates the implications of the canonical meaning of Ethiopian modernity and modernism as it covers the assumptions and heuristics that have shaped the grand tradition of Ethiopian political thought. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for an alternative Ethiopian modernism that critically interrogates how the history and cultures of the non-Western ‘Other’ engage the larger context of modernism. It emphasizes that the meaning of Ethiopian modernism can only be consequential if it is examined through changing conditions of the ideologies of formal and conceptual representations that fortify such changes