Cruel City

Under the pseudonym Eza Boto, Mongo Beti wrote Ville cruelle (Cruel City) in 1954 before he came to the world's attention with the publication of Le pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bomba). Cruel City tells the story of a young man's attempt to cope with capitalism and the rapid urbanization of his country. Banda, the protagonist, sets off to sell the year's cocoa harvest to earn the bride price for the woman he has chosen to wed. Due to a series of misfortunes, Banda loses both his crop and his bride to be. Making his way to the city, Banda is witness to a changing Africa, and as his journey progresses, the novel mirrors these changes in its style and language. Published here with the author's essay "Romancing Africa," the novel signifies a pivotal moment in African literature, a deliberate challenge to colonialism, and a new kind of African writing.

Ruuth reviews the murders, suicides, and mysterious deaths of filmland's greats and near-greats.

A contemplation of the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much a myth as a physical reality. Amos Elon’s elegant, dazzling biography of Jerusalem gives a profound insight into the kaleidoscopic culture of this magical city. Battle-scarred from four thousand years of violent conflict, the holy city is a sacred symbol of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and its religious wars of today reflect those of the past — Arab versus Jew, orthodox versus secular, continuity versus change. “[a] remarkable portrait of Jerusalem...” — Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times “Jerusalem: City of Mirrors is a word portrait like none of those that have come before of the fabled city. It is from the loving but unsparing pen of Israel's most elegant iconoclast.” — Peter Grose, The New York Times “A brilliantly illuminating book.” — Philip Roth “Finely written and very readable... Elon’s contention, and convincing demonstration, that religious fanaticism and communal violence are deeply ingrained in Jerusalem’s geography and its long history (four thousand years) leave little hope for the ‘city of mirrors.’” — John C. Campbell, Foreign Affairs “Elon... has written a literary, and often lyrical, biography of the images of Jerusalem” — Roger Friedland and Richard Hecht, Los Angeles Times “Elon’s Jerusalem is both a learned book and a charming one... He places us before a veritable many-layered mountain of myth and history, a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide. It is a book as complex and surprising as the city itself.” — Arthur Miller “A superbly readable study.” — Jewish Chronicle “A book which should be read by all.” — Catholic Herald “Jerusalem, the most longed-for and fought-for of all cities, is probably also the most written about. Yet, if I had to recommend one contemporary book about Jerusalem for everyone concerned with the city — both visitors and Jerusalemites — would certainly be this one.” — Dan Leon, Palestine-Israel Journal

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these cities’ world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous staging of multiple events within Edinburgh’s Summer Festivals and Adelaide’s Mad March that generates the visibility and festive atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative event in which festival debates and controversies spilled out beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the festivalisation phenomenon.

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138713864_oachapter4.pdf

This volume is a blend of language and literature papers highlighting linguistic functionality and topicality in poetry, novels, translation and education. It sheds light on the fictionalised reality of a strained official linguistic cohabitation in Cameroon as instantiated in present-day colonial legacy claims. It deals with issues of translation as a stylistic exercise whereby the translator has some creativity licence when rendering the source text into the target language, thus embracing Skopos theory’s view of translation as a purposeful activity determined by the target text and audience. This book also looks at an educational conception of translation as opposed to a professional translation curriculum and advocates a comprehensive needs analysis for translator education in the context of translation teaching at the Advanced School of Translators and Interpreters (ASTI) in Cameroon. The chapters also examine teacher and student discourse in the context of English Language teaching in tertiary education in China and pinpoint a dominant teacher’s voice made relevant by a Confucian didactic indexicality, which appears to be a stumbling block to any dialogic classroom discourse, despite a new curriculum promoting communicative language teaching and student-centredness. This book will appeal to academics in the fields of language and literature in general and in Cameroon and China in particular. It will also be a valuable resource for professional translators and those concerned with teaching the subject in academia as it explores a pragmatic conception of translation and envisages it, beyond professionality, as an academic field.

There is no escaping the Jerusalem of the religious imagination. Not once but three times holy, its overwhelming spiritual significance looms large over the city's complex urban landscape and the diurnal rhythms and struggles that make up its earthbound existence. Nonetheless, writes Paola Caridi, in this intimate and hard-hitting portrayal of the city, it is possible to close one's eyes and, "like the blind listening to sounds," discern the conflict and plurality of belonging that mark out the city' secular character. Jerusalem without God leads the reader through the streets, malls, suburbs, traffic jams, and squares of Jerusalem's present moment, into the daily lives of the men and women who inhabit it. Caridi brings contemporary Jerusalem alive by describing it as a place of sights and senses, sounds and smells, but she also shows us a city riven by the harsh asymmetry of power and control embodied in its lines, limits, walls, and borders. She explores a cruel city, where Israeli and Palestinian civilians sometimes spend hours in the same supermarkets, only to return to the confines of their respective districts, invisible to each other; a city memorable for its ancient stones and shimmering sunsets but dotted with Israeli checkpoints, "postmodern drawbridges," that control the movement of people, ideas, and potential attackers. Describing Jerusalem through the lenses of urban planners and politicians, anthropologists and archaeologists, advertisers and scholars, Jerusalem without God reveals a city that is as diverse as it is complex, and ultimately, argues its author, one whose destiny cannot be tied to any single religious faith, tradition, or political ideology.