Interweaving Afro-Asian solidarity: A global textile factory floor in Ethiopia

Abstract

Many Indian textile and garment firms moved to Ethiopia, towing their machines through the new expressways and train lines constructed with Chinese financial and technical aid. These firms were lured by the laborers ready to work at wages that were five times cheaper than in China, and a duty-free export market supported by the African Growth and Opportunity Act signed with the USA. Deploying ethnographic methods, this chapter on Indian textile and garment making in Ethiopia seeks to identify the practices, developmental, or otherwise woven from the intersectional experiences of work, race, gender, and nationality. Although far from the old visions of postcolonial solidarity, Indian and Ethiopian interactions nonetheless generate new possibilities of humanist practices emerging from their shared subjecthood on the periphery of the Global North-determined world order.