Visions of Zion: Ethiopians and Rastafari in the Search for the Promised Land

Visions of Zion, by the media scholar Erin C. MacLeod, is the first sustained study of how Ethiopians themselves perceive the Rastafari community settled at Shashamane on land Haile Selassie I granted in 1948. Drawing on more than ninety interviews conducted primarily at Shashamane, MacLeod centers the host society's perspective rather than repeating the settlers' own well documented account of repatriation, tracing how Ethiopian law and Ethiopian neighbors have received an immigrant community that understands itself as returning members of the Ethiopian diaspora. Its authority rests on extensive original interview fieldwork and New York University Press's standard scholarly peer review. Its limit is that its interview base, drawn primarily from Shashamane itself, speaks most directly to that one settlement rather than to Rastafari repatriation or Ethiopian public opinion nationwide.