El primer estudio serio del teatro del siglo XVII en Murcia.
Este libro, basado en abundante documentación de archivo, es el primer estudio serio del teatro del siglo XVII en Murcia. El autor se centra en los primeros teatros comerciales de la ciudad. El más antiguo, situado en un patio delHospital de Nuestra Señora de Gracia, está documentado desde 1593. Fue sustituido en 1609 por el Teatro del Toro, construido por el Ayuntamiento en un emplazamiento pegado a la antigua muralla del Alcázar, tomando como modelo laCasa de Comedias de Córdoba. El derrumbe parcial de este edificio en 1633 (ya se había hundido en 1613) llevó al Municipio a construir apresuradamente otro teatro, el del Buen Suceso, en la céntrica plaza de Santa Catalina; pero cinco años después, ante los problemas estructurales del nuevo teatro, se decidió restablecer definitivamente el del Toro. El volumen ofrece asimismo numerosos datos sobre las compañías de actores que visitaron esta ciudad mediterránea, situada estratégicamente entre Valencia y Andalucía.
RAFAEL SANCHEZ MARTINEZ es Doctor por la Universidad de Murcia.
H.A. Wilson
The Gregorian Sacramentary
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Robert Lippe
Missale Romanum
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Michael Lapidge
Anglo-Saxon Litanies of the Saints
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Most of these litanies, taken from nearly fifty manuscripts written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England, have never previously been printed. The texts of the litanies provide an indispensable resource for scholars seeking to understand the spirituality of Anglo-Saxon England, to localise the manuscript in which the litanies are contained, and to trace the development and diffusion of eary medieval saints' cults. The volume is accompanied by comprehensive indices of all the saints named in the litanies here printed, and of all the liturgical forms of prayer which they contain. It also includes an extensive introduction which traces the origin and development of this particular form of prayer in Anglo-Saxon England.MICHAEL LAPIDGEis Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Cambridge.
J. Wickham Legg
Cranmer's Liturgical Projects
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A Jefferies Collins
Manuale ad usum Percelebris Ecclesia Sarisburiansis
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Dom Louis Brou OSB
The Monastic Ordinale of St Vedast's Abbey Arras
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Beate Günzel
Aelfwine's Prayerbook B.L. Cotton Titus D.xxvi + xxvii
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The Henry Bradshaw Society's policy of presenting integral editions of rare liturgical manuscripts is a reflection of the fact that, before the invention of printing, service books varied widely from country to country, from church to church, and even from individual book to individual book, with the result that surviving medieval liturgical manuscripts are usually unique entities which can profitably be studies as a reflection of the local circumstances (and frequently of the particular individuals) which produced them. This is especially true in the case of private prayerbooks, where each manuscript embodies the interests and spiritual concerns of the patron who commissioned it or the scribe who compiled and copies it. The present edition of 'Ælfwine's Prayerbook' (which was originally produced as a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Professor Helmut Gneuss, one of the Society's distinguishedVice-Presidents), by Beate Günzel, is a splendid manifestation of the intellectual and spiritual interests of a dean who serves the community of the New Minster in Winchester during the first half of the eleventh century, and hence of the clear light which liturgical manuscripts can shed on the literary culture of later Anglo-Saxon England. It was is issued to members for the year 1992.
J H Bernard, R Atkinson
The Irish Liber Hymnorum Volume I
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Susan Twyman
Papal Ceremonial at Rome in the Twelfth Century
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An examination of the papal adventus ceremony, deriving from the ritual reception performed for the ruler in antiquity, and the changes it underwent during the century.
This book examines the character and significance of the adventus ceremonies which were accorded to medieval popes and for which there is much evidence in the twelfth-century sources. The papal adventus, hitherto unstudied in anylanguage, retained the framework and much of the familiar symbolism of the ritual reception performed for the ruler in antiquity. During the twelfth century it was performed for popes with unprecedented frequency, providing, in particular, a vital part of the papal accession ritual. On such occasions adventus represented a demonstration of consent to rule, a sense that was expressed through traditional idioms evoking the triumph of the ruler. But the meaning of the ritual altered towards the end of the century as a result of the breakdown of relations between the papacy and the Romans, and the adventus provided an opportunity for the Romans to express their own agenda wherein consent meant the right of acceptance or veto by the people.
Dr SUSAN TWYMAN teaches in the Faculty of Continuing Education, Birkbeck College, London University.
Bernat Metge, David Barnett
Book of Fortune and Prudence (Llibre de Fortuna i Prudència)
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A medieval Catalan verse fantasy by Bernat Metge, the most important Catalan writer of the fourteenth century,
Written around 1381 by Bernat Metge, the most important Catalan writer of the fourteenth century, the Llibre de Fortuna i Prudència is a fantasy in verse, drawing on learned sources, principally The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. Early one morning, Bernat, the protagonist and narrator, decides to alleviate his sorrows by strolling around the harbour of Barcelona. He meets an old man, apparently a beggar, who tricks him into getting into a boat which, despite the absence of sails and oars, conveys him to an island where the goddess Fortuna appears to him. In a heated discussion, Bernat blames her for all his misfortunes. His next meeting is with Prudenciawho is accompanied by seven maidens representing the liberal arts. Prudencia is able to lessen his despair, and exhorts him to trust in providence and renounce material possessions. When she considers him cured, she and the maidens send him sailing back to Barcelona, where he quickly goes home to avoid gossiping townsfolk.
Published in association with Editorial Barcino, Barcelona.
DAVID BARNETT, whose doctorate is from Queen Mary, University of London, continues to be involved in research on medieval Catalan literature.
E.A. Lowe
The Bobbio Missal
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The Bobbio Missal is one of the most important and interesting liturgical books surviving from the early middle ages. It is the best known example of the `Gallican' type of missal, attesting therefore to the distinctive liturgicalpractices which were widespread in Merovingian and Frankish churches during the seventh and eighth centuries, before these began to tbe replaced by the Roman practices including use of `Gregorian' missals in various forms duringthe period of Charlemagne's reforms. In the opinion of modern palaeographers, the Bobbio Missal was written somewhere in northern Italy in the mid-eighth century. Although it was long regarded as a witness to Irish liturgical practice, it is now considered as essentially Gallican, but incorporating various prayers of Gelasian origin. Palaeographically the manuscript (now Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, lat. 13246) is of great interest, being written in anidiosyncratic mixture of uncial and minuscule, by an Italian scribe neither literate nor well-trained. HBS LVIII, HBSLXI
Xon de Ros
A Companion to Spanish Women's Studies
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An overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of Women's Studies within the area of peninsular Hispanism.
After an introductory survey of the development of women's studies in the context of Spain, twenty-one chronologically ordered essays by scholars from Britain, the United States, Spain and Mexico explore women's roles in the cultural production of their time from the Middle Ages to the present. The essays of the first half examine the work of the earliest women writers and artists - memoirs and meditations, novellas and plays - and the representationor self-representation of women in a broad sweep of texts including medieval folksong, hagiography, and painting of the Baroque era. The modern section focuses on women's participation in politics and culture from the eighteenth century onwards: as translators and essayists, as consumers of visual ephemera and conduct books, as writers and artists, film directors and performers. An alternative and supplement to standard literary histories, thisvolume offers new insights into women's agency and representation in the cultural heritage of Spain. It will prove a useful and stimulating resource for students at all levels, and an accessible guide for the general reader.
XON DE ROS and GERALDINE HAZBUN lecture in Spanish literature at the University of Oxford. CONTRIBUTORS: Nieves Baranda, Andrew M. Beresford, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, Helena Buffery, Rosanna Cantavella, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Georgina Dopico-Black, Joanna Evans, Carmen Fracchia, Margaret F. Greer, Jessamy Harvey, Louise M. Haywood, Geraldine Hazbun, Susan Kirkpatrick, Frances Lannon, Laura Lonsdale, María Ana Masera Cerutti, Roberta Quance, Xonde Ros, Alexander Samson, Alison Sinclair, Joyce Tolliver.
Federico Bonaddio
A Companion to Federico García Lorca
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Lorca, icon and polymath in all his manifestations.
A Companion to Federico García Lorca provides a clear, critical appraisal of the issues and debates surrounding the work of Spain's most celebrated poet and dramatist. It considers past and current approaches to the study of Lorca, and also suggests new directions for further investigation. An introduction on the often contentious subject of Lorca's biography is followed by five chapters - poetry, theatre, music, drawing and cinema - which togetheracknowledge the polymath in Lorca. A further three chapters - religion, gender and sexuality, and politics - complete the volume by covering important thematic concerns across a number of texts, concerns which must be considered in the context of the iconic status that Lorca has acquired and against the background of the cultural shifts affecting his readership. The Companion is a testament to Lorca's enduring appeal and, through its explication oftexts and investigation of the man, demonstrates just why he continues, and should continue, to attract scholarly interest.
FEDERICO BONADDIO lectures in Modern Spanish Studies at King's College London. CONTRIBUTORS: FEDERICO BONADDIO, JACQUELINE COCKBURN, NIGEL DENNIS, CHRISTOPHER MAURER, ALBERTO MIRA, ANTONIO MONEGAL, CHRIS PERRIAM, XON DE ROS, ERIC SOUTHWORTH, D. GARETH WALTERS, SARAH WRIGHT
Ramon Llull
Ramon Llull
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The autobiography of an influential medieval Catalan intellectual.
Ramon Llull was a highly original medieval writer and thinker. Direct contact with Moslem culture during his early years in Majorca, soon after the Christian reconquest, furnished him with a vision of the "Other" quite unique among medieval European intellectuals. It was not, however, until his thirties that he abandoned the courtly life, immersed himself in theological and philosophical studies and began his sustained campaign of conversion. He travelledon many occasions throughout Europe in search of royal and papal support and undertook several missions to north Africa, in the course of one of which he was stoned and imprisoned. Despite his many travels he found time to compose more than 260 works, in Catalan and Latin, many of which related to his famous "Art", a method for religious discussion with scientific and logical applications that subsequently influenced Giordano Bruno and Liebniz. When he was almost eighty years old, Llull dictated the story of his life to a group of Carthusians in Paris, leaving us this fascinating autobiography. This edition includes both an English translation and the original Latin version.
Published in association with Editorial Barcino.
ANTHONY BONNER is a translator and scholar who has published extensively on Ramon Llull.
Ausiàs March, Robert Archer
Ausiàs March: Verse Translations of Thirty Poems
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Verse translations of selected works by Ausiàs March, the great fifteenth-century Valencian poet.
The Valencian Ausiàs March [1400-1459] was one of the greatest poets writing in Europe in the fifteenth century. His work is characterized by a powerful and unique voice and by the constant innovation that allowed him not only todevelop traditional genres, but to compose poems that virtually created genres of their own. This selection includes poems on love, a cycle of six compositions on grief, a long poem on God and predestination, others of praise andvilification, or on philosophical themes. While March has previously been translated into English prose, this anthology offers translations that, more than an aid to understanding the medieval Catalan, aspire to be poems that can be enjoyed in English without constant reference to the original. The translator has worked for several decades on Ausiàs March, and has produced a critical edition and two anthologies, as well as prose translations.
ROBERT ARCHER holds the Cervantes Chair of Spanish at King's College London. Published in association with Editorial Barcino
Jacint Verdaguer, Ronald Puppo
Mount Canigó
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Catalonia's towering Romantic poet and rebel priest, Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902), delves deep into the Catalan imaginary in his foundational long poem Mount Canigó (1886), recounting the historical and legendary mix, bothtragic and triumphant, of the medieval origins of modern Catalonia.
Winner of the 2016 "Serra d'Or" Critics Award for Research in Catalan Studies
Catalonia's towering Romantic poet and rebel priest, Jacint Verdaguer (1845-1902), delves deep into the Catalan imaginary in his foundational long poem Mount Canigó (1886), recounting the historical and legendary mix, both tragicand triumphant, of the medieval origins of modern Catalonia. The collision between duty and love is mirrored by the symbolic conflict between, on the one hand, a powerful folk mythology rooted in the natural geography and, on theother, the widely institutionalized universalism of Christianity concomitant to the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. Rich in lyrical and thematic correspondence with long poems ranging from La chanson de Roland, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Spenser's Faerie Queene to Milton's Paradise Lost, Longfellow's Evangeline and Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Verdaguer's masterful verse rivals all the legendary magic andwonder of the mountains themselves.
Jacint Verdaguer is regarded as one of the greatest poets of Catalan literature.
Ronald Puppo is the translator of Selected Poems of Jacint Verdaguer: A Bilingual Edition. Mount Canigó: A Tale of Catalonia is published in association with Editorial Barcino.
Stephen M Hart
A Companion to Magical Realism
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A refreshing new interdisciplinary slant on magical realism as an international literary phenomenon emerging from the trauma of colonial dispossession.
Companion to Magical Realism provides an assessment of the world-wide impact of a movement which was incubated in Germany, flourished in Latin America and then spread to the rest of the world. It provides a set of up-to-date assessments of the work of writers traditionally associated with magical realism such as Gabriel García Márquez [in particular his recently published memoirs], Alejo Carpentier, Miguel ngel Asturias, Juan Rulfo, Isabel Allende,Laura Esquivel and Salman Rushdie, as well as bringing into the fold new authors such as W.B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, José Saramago, Dorit Rabinyan, Ovid, María Luisa Bombal, Ibrahim al-Kawni, Mayra Montero, Nakagami Kenji, José Eustasio Rivera and Elias Khoury, discussed for the first time in the context of magical realism. Written in a jargon-free style, and with all quotations translated into English, this book offers a refreshing new interdisciplinary slant on magical realism as an international literary phenomenon emerging from the trauma of colonial dispossession. The companion also has a Guide to Further Reading.
Stephen Hart is Professor of Hispanic Studies, University College London and Doctor Honoris Causa of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Peru. Wen-chin Ouyang lectures in Arabic Literature and Comparative Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies,London.
Sabine Köllmann
A Companion to Mario Vargas Llosa
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This Companion offers an overview and assessment of Mario Vargas Llosa's large body of work, tracing his development as a writer and intellectual in his essays, critical studies, journalism, and theatrical works, but above all inhis novels.
This companion to the work of Peruvian Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa traces his fictional and non-fictional writing throughout the different phases of a career spanning more than fifty years. His lifelong dedication to literature goes hand in hand with his commitment as a public intellectual, a role that frequently involves him in controversy. Against the backdrop of Vargas Llosa's political and intellectual development this study brings out the continuities and interrelations that give unity and coherence to a diverse body of work. It highlights the thematic concerns that re-emerge at different points in his writing and link Vargas Llosa's journalism and essays with his fiction: the effects of social ills on the individual, the nature of fiction, and the importance of literature for society. The novels at the centre of his work combine passionate storytelling with technical complexity and an often playful experimentation with genres. This book not only provides a comprehensive overview of Vargas Llosa's writing in the context of his intellectual biography, but looks in detail at each individual work, summarizing contents and analyzing the interplay of form, language, and meaning. A bibliography and suggestions for further reading complement this Companion which will serve the general reader as much as the undergraduate and scholar.
Stephen M. Hart
A Companion to Latin American Film
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A history of Latin American cinema, with detailed analysis of the twenty-five best films.
Latin American cinema has seen major developments in the past half-century, and some of the most exciting work in contemporary film now originates there. This Companion traces its development from the mid 1890s, with particular attention to the early period when it was dominated by foreign film makers (or foreign models such as Hollywood), through the 1960s when as a genre it found its feet - the New Latin American Cinema movement - and beyond. Detailed analysis of the best twenty-five films of Latin America follows: cast and crew, awards, plots, themes and techniques. The 'Guide to Further Reading' includes important books, articles and Internet sites.
FILMS:Que viva México Los olvidados Dos tipos de cuidado Orfeu Negro Memorias del subdesarrollo Lucía El chacal de Nahueltoro Yawar Mallku La batalla de Chile La última cena Pixote: a lei do mais fraco El Norte Camila La historia oficial Cartas del parque La tarea Yo, la peor de todas La frontera El viaje Fresa y chocolate Como agua para chocolate Central do Brasil Amores perros Y tu mamá también Cidade de Deus.
STEPHEN M. HART is Professor of Hispanic Studies, University College London, and Profesor Honorario, Universidad de San Marcos, Lima.
Cristòfol Despuig
Cristòfol Despuig: Dialogues
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Renaissance dialogues from C16th Catalonia, in which three speakers elegantly discuss politics, society and the Church.
Dialogue is one of the Classical genres reclaimed by the Renaissance, which turns it into a hallmark of the period. In the Catalan-speaking world nearly forty dialogues were written in the course of the Renaissance. Despuig's Dialogues, written in 1557, stand out from the rest by the extent to which they incorporate the most innovative aspects of the genre: the dramatisation of Renaissance multiple perspectives and the consistency of the fictional plot that provides a structure for the ideas. The Dialogues offer a critical review of a host of issues that were topical at the time. The three speakers in the work - Livio, the knight from Tortosa; Fabio, the gentleman from Tortosa; and Don Pedro, the knight from Valencia - elegantly exchange their subtly contrasting views regarding politics, society and the Church as they stroll through the streets of the city Tortosa and sail along the Ebro.The main features of the dialogue, which typify the revival of the genre in the Renaissance, lie in the way it expresses differing opinions, creates multiple perspectives and constructs a consistent plot that imitates a spontaneous conversation whilst providing a structure for the speakers' reflections. Both the ways in which it articulates the discussion and the specific ideas that it allocates to its speakers make Despuig's Dialogues a text thatexemplifies the Renaissance in Catalonia.
Published in association with Editorial Barcino, Barcelona.
Isabel de Villena, Joan Curbet, Robert D. Hughes
Portraits of Holy Women
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The Vita Christi, written by the abbess Isabel de Villena, is the only literary work in Catalan to bear the signature of a woman during the Middle Ages. It represents a fascinating re-evaluation of the role women played inthe life of Jesus Christ.
The Life of Christ (Vita Christi), written by the abbess Isabel de Villena, is the only literary work to have been preserved in Catalan and to bear the signature of a woman during the Middle Ages. It was composed to provide spiritual direction for the nuns within the community of Poor Clares which Sor (i.e. Sister) Isabel oversaw at the Convent of the Holy Trinity in Valencia. The work was only able to emerge from obscurity by accident. In 1497 Queen Isabel of Castile, the wife of Ferdinand of Catalonia-Aragon, who had heard news of the book's existence, asked Sor Isabel's successor for a copy. The new Abbess, Sor Aldonça, responded by bringing the work to press. Queen Isabel's interest in Sor Isabel's book was understandable. The former abbess had been the daughter of the refined and restless Marquess of Villena, and was herself educated at Court, a milieu with which she maintained very positive relations throughout her life. As an abbess, what's more, she carried out important reforms at the convent and became a valued and respected figure within the dynamic cultural world of the Valencia of her day. Isabelde Villena's Vita Christi has often been interpreted as a response, delivered from the serenity of the cloister, to the misogyny and satire against the female gender emanating from certain books written at that time. Sor Isabel's work is a re-evaluation of the role women played in the life of Jesus Christ, a role at variance with the subsidiary one ascribed to them by the majority of commentators.
Published in association with Editorial Barcino, Barcelona.
Glyn S. Burgess
Marie de France
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A listing of the latest publications on Marie de France.
This is the fourth volume of Marie de France Bibliography, following on from the original volume [1977] and the two Supplements [1986, 1997]. Each volume provides full details of editions and translations of the three works normally attributed to Marie de France [the Lais, the Fables and the Espurgatoire seint Patriz], plus alphabetically arranged lists of books and articles, each accompanied by a substantial summary, and informationon theses and dissertations.
GLYN S BURGESS is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Liverpool.
Aníbal González
A Companion to Spanish American Modernismo
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The first Spanish-language literary movement to originate in the New World and subsequently influence literary activity in Spain continues to be relevant to contemporary Spanish American writers.
Modernismo, a literary movement of fundamental importance to Spanish America and Spain, occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century, roughly from the 1880s to the 1920s. It is widely regarded as the first Spanish-language literary movement that originated in the New World and that became influential in the "Mother Country," Spain. Characterized by the appropriation of French Symbolist aesthetics into Spanish-language literature, modernismo's other significant traits were its cultural cosmopolitanism, its philological concern with language, literary history, and literary technique, and its journalistic penchant for novelty and fashion. Despite the splendor of modernista poetry, modernismo is now understood as a broad movement whose impact was felt just as strongly in the prose genres: the short story, the novel, the essay, and the journalistic crónica [chronicle]. Conceived as an introduction to modernismo as well as an account of the current state of the art of modernismo studies, this book examines the movement's contribution to the various Spanish American literary genres, its main authors [from Martí and Nájera to Darío and Rodó], its social and historical context, and its continuing relevance to the work of contemporary Spanish American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Sergio Ramírez, aargas Llosa.
ANÍBAL GONZÁLEZ-PÉREZ is Professor of Modern Latin American Literature at Yale University.
Jonathan Thacker
A Companion to Golden Age Theatre
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This Companion is a readable and up-to-date guide to all aspects of the extraordinary flowering of theatre in Early-Modern Spain.
Spain's artistic Golden Age produced Cervantes's great novel, Don Quijote, the sublime poetry of Quevedo and Góngora, and nurtured the prodigious talent of Velázquez, and yet it was the theatre that captured the imaginationof its people. Men and women of all social classes flocked to the new playhouses to see and hear the latest offerings of their favourite dramatists, and to be seen and heard. As well as dealing with the lives and major works of the most significant playwrights of the period - Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Miguel de Cervantes, Calderón de la Barca - the Companion focusses on other aspects of the growth and maturing of Golden Age theatre, reflecting the interests and priorities of modern scholarship. These include: the sixteenth-century origins of the comedia nueva; the lesser-known dramatists, including women playwrights; life in the theatre; the Corpus Christi street theatre and minor genres; performance studies; and the critical reception of the drama. The Companion also contains a guide to comedia versification, a full bibliography and advice on further reading.
JONATHAN THACKER is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.
Stephen Parkinson
A Companion to Portuguese Literature
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An essential chronological framework for students of Portuguese literature.
This companion volume offers an introduction to European Portuguese literature for university-level readers. It consists of a chronological overview of Portuguese literature from the twelfth century to the present day, by some ofthe most distinguished literary scholars of recent years, leading into substantial essays centred on major authors, genres or periods, and a study of the history of translations. It does not attempt an encyclopaedic coverage of Portuguese literature, but provides essential chronological and bibliographical information on all major authors and genres, with more extensive treatment of key works and literary figures, and a particular focus on the modern period. It is unashamedly canonical rather than thematic in its examination of central authors and periods, without neglecting female writers. In this way it provides basic reference materials for students beginning the study of Portuguese literature, and for a wider audience looking for general or specific information. The editors have made a principled decision to exclude both Brazilian and African literature, which demand separate treatment.
STEPHEN PARKINSON, CLAUDIA PAZOS ALONSO and T. F. EARLE are all members of the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at the University of Oxford. CONTRIBUTORS: Vanda Anastácio, Helena Carvalhao Buescu, Rip Cohen, T. F. Earle, David Frier,Luís Gomes, Mariana Gray de Castro, Helder Macedo, Patricia Odber de Baubeta, Hilary Owen, Stephen Parkinson, Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Juliet Perkins, Teresa Pinto Coelho, Phillip Rothwell, Mark Sabine, Claire Williams, Clive Willis.
Peter Standish
A Companion to Mexican Studies
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A comprehensive guide to the evolution of the major creative aspects of Mexican culture from pre-Columbian times to the present.
This Companion volume traces the evolution of the major creative aspects of Mexican culture from pre-Columbian times to the present. Dealing in turn with the cultures of Mesoamerica, the colonial period, the onset of independenceand the modern era, the author explores Aztec arts, the role of the performing arts in the process of evangelisation, manifestations of cultural dependence, of the search for national identity, and the struggle for modernity, drawing examples from such diverse activities as architecture, painting, music, dance, literature, film and media. There is also a brief account of the distinctive characteristics of Mexican Spanish. Maps, a chronology, a bibliographical essay and a lengthy bibliography round off this comprehensive guide, making it an indispensable research tool for those seriously interested in Mexican culture.
Peter Standish is Professor of Spanish at one of the divisions of the University of North Carolina system.
Teresa Ferrer Valls
La Práctica escénica cortesana: de la época del Emperador a la de Felipe III
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A study of the relationship betwen court festivity and theatre in 16c Spain.
Dr Ferrer Valls studies the relationship between court festivity and theatre in the sixteenth century, placing special emphasis on staging. She argues that throughout the reign of Philip II court spectacle perpetuates the complicated staging of traditional performances, but with greater emphasis on their dramatic aspects and on the use of music and song. In the first two decades of the seventeenth century, and above all in specific plays by Lope de Vega, court spectacles come to reflect also the influence of Italian staging techniques.
Martin Banham
African Theatre 7: Companies
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Profiles theatre companies in Africa working creatively in the context of financial and political constraints.
A close scrutiny of how theatre companies operate is an often neglected aspect of theatre life in Africa, yet, as companies profiled here grapple with the issues of 'creativity and collaboration' much is revealed about the way theatre companies across the continent face the challenges of financial constraints, the political complications of sponsorship and funding, the need for creative or intellectual freedoms, the intricacies of contracts and the crucial decisions about venues and audiences.
Volume Editor: JAMES GIBBS, University of the West of England. Series editors: Martin Banham, James Gibbs, Femi Osofisan
The contributors include: DEXTER LYNDERSAY, FOLUKE OUGUNLEYE, SIRI LANGE, ALLY MKUMBILA, BRACCO CHITOSA, MANFRED LOIMEIR, LUCY RICHARDSON, CHRISTINE MATZKE, VICTOR S. DUGGA, PATRICK-JUDE OTEH, BASIL JONES, MICHAEL WALLING, BRITISH COUNCIL, JOS REPERTORY THEATRE.
Stefano Ponte
Contested Sustainability
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Richly detailed and timely study on conservation, development and sustainability in Tanzania.
Provides valuable insights into the successes and failures of the management and governance of wildlife, forestry and coastal resources.
Responding to the urgent need to examine the outcome of interventions in governing natural resources, this book analyses different types of sustainability partnerships - with donors, governments, business, NGOs and other actors, and, crucially, assesses which result in better livelihood and environmental outcomes.
The contributors, from a range of disciplines, compare 'more complex' partnerships to relatively 'simpler', more traditional top-down and centralized management systems and to location where sustainability partnerships are not in place. Within-sector comparisons allow a fine-tuned analysis that is formed of historical, location and resource-specific issues, which can be used as input for resource-specific policy and partnership design. Experiences and lessons can be drawn from comparisons across the three different sectors, which can be applied to natural resource governance more broadly.
This book is openly available in digital formats under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.
Anthony Close
A Companion to Don Quixote
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An introduction to Cervantes's complex masterpiece.
The purpose of this book is to help the English-speaking reader, with an interest in Spanish literature but without specialised knowledge of Cervantes, to understand his long and complex masterpiece: its major themes, its structure, and the inter-connections between its component parts. Beginning from a review of Don Quixote's relation to Cervantes's life, literary career, and its social and cultural context, Anthony Close goes on to examine the structure and distinctive nature of Part I (1605) and Part II (1615), the conception of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho, Cervantes's word-play and narrative manner, and the historical evolution of posterity's interpretation of the novel, with particular attention to its influence on the theory of the genre. One of the principal questions tackled is the paradoxical incongruity between Cervantes's conception of his novel as a light work ofentertainment, without any explicitly acknowledged profundity, and posterity's view of it as a universally symbolic masterpiece, revolutionary in the context of its own time, and capable of meaning something new and different to each succeeding age.
ANTHONY CLOSE, now retired, was Reader in Spanish at the University of Cambridge.
David K. Herzberger
A Companion to Javier Marías
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A detailed and lively discussion and analysis of the novels, short stories, newspaper columns, and other works of one of the most important and popular writers in Spain today.
This book provides the most comprehensive study to date of the full range of Marías' writing, including discussion and analysis of his literary and intellectual formation, his development as a novelist and short story writer, andhis unique perspective offered in nearly twenty-five years of newspaper columns on topics ranging from religion to football. Above all, Marías is examined as a writer of fictions. As a translator of several canonical works from English to Spanish, Marías came to appreciate the preciseness of words as well as their ambiguity, their capacity to represent as well as their propensity to distort. The author examines Marías's constant awareness of how languagecan be used to construct stories as the foundation for engaging the world as well as for imagining it. The nature of Marías's storytelling, and the way in which he imagines, form the principal focus of this Companion.
David K. Herzberger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside.
Jason Wilson
A Companion to Pablo Neruda
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The making of a great Chilean poet.
Pablo Neruda was without doubt one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. However, his work is extremely uneven, and long. The companion examines the view that there are two Nerudas, an early Romantic visionary and a later Marxist populist, who denied his earlier poetic self. By focussing on the poet's apprenticeship, his struggle to read and incorporate French poetry and travel abroad and by looking closely at how Neruda created his poetic persona within his poems, this companion tries to establish what should survive of his massive output. By seeing his early work as self exploration through metaphor and sound, as well as through varieties of love and direct experience,the companion outlines a unity behind all the work, based on voice and a public self. This companion studies Neruda's debt to reading and books in depth and re-examines his change in poetics by concentrating on the early work up to Residencia en la tierra I and II and why he wanted to become a poet. Many critics have argued that some kind of critical assessment must be made in order for Neruda's later work to be read. This companion grounds this debate about quality and representativity in his Romantic thinking, sensibility and sincerity. Unlike a Borges or a Paz who accompanied their creative work with analytical essays, Neruda distilled all his experiences into hispoems, which remain his true biography.
Jason Wilson is Professor Emeritus at University College London.
Katarzyna Olga Beilin
Conversaciones literarias con novelistas contemporáneos
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Interviews, with contextual critical material, with nine celebrated contemporary Hispanic novelists.
Nine of today's most celebrated Hispanic writers reveal themselves and their concerns, and how the latter are reflected in their work. The writers are Ricardo Piglia, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Juan José Millás, José María Merino, Enrique Vila-Matas, Quim Monzó, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Pedro Zarraluki and Ray Loriga. The interviews allow readers closer personal acquaintance with the subjects, their fiction and their cultural circumstances, in the process touching on major intellectual issues of today - the definition of reality, the role of art and the challenge of otherness. Each conversation is introduced by an essay commenting on the main themes in the author's works. The book contains a detailed bibliography and an extensive general introduction, which presents the intellectual context for the issues discussed. Entrevistas con Ricardo Piglia y ocho eminentes escritores españoles: Antonio Muñoz Molina, Juan José Millás, José María Merino, Enrique Vila-Matas, Quim Monzó, Cristina Fernández Cubas, Pedro Zarraluki y Ray Loriga. Son extensas conversaciones sobre la narrativa de cada escritor, abordando los problemas máss en ella. Pero las conversaciones no sólo permiten conocer a fondo a los escritores y entender mejor sus ideas sino también contienen gran variedad de comentarios sobre los temas más polémicos de finales del siglo XX - el carácter de la realidad, el papel del arte y la importancia de la otredad. Las entrevistas van precedidas de ensayos que se centran en la obra de cada autor y de una introducción general, donde se presentan los temas tratados, y las acompaña una bibliografía detallada. KATARZYNA OLGA BEILIN es profesora de español en la Universidad de Wisconsin en Madison.
Catherine O'Leary
A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite
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A comprehensive examination of the full range of Carmen Martín Gaite's work.
Carmen Martín Gaite produced a large body of work in various genres over the course of her five-decade career, though she is primarily known as a novelist, short story writer, and social commentator. Her work at times reflects, and at times defies, the pattern of development in Spanish fiction since the 1950s. This Companion offers a re-reading of Martín Gaite's works, emphasizing her early experimentalism which culminated in mid-career works (notably El cuarto de atrás), and stressing how, in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the majority of Spanish novelists were engaged in a critique of history, Martín Gaite turned to the writing of cultural history, exploring its intersection with narrative fiction in a positivist rather than a nihilistic mode. Her exploration of gender issues, particularly mother-child relations, towards the end of her career anticipated new directions in feminist thought. Discussions of often-ignored works, such as poetry, drama, children's literature, and literary translations, offer insight into sidelined aspects of this writer's literary output.
Catherine O'Leary is Reader in Spanish at the University of St Andrews. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is Professor of Spanish at the University of Warwick.
Dr Benjamin Rubbers
Inside Mining Capitalism
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A groundbreaking analysis of 21st century labour practices in the mining industry and the new scramble for industrial power on the African continent.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, African countries with mineral resources have witnessed an unprecedented rise in foreign direct investments and the development of new flexible workforce management practices in the mining industry. But what does this mean for those who actually work in this industry? Based on research in the Congo and Zambia, where a mining boom has led to more than thirty new mining projects in recent years, this book explores the processes of improvisation and adaptation behind the emergence of this neoliberal labour regime. The contributors show how mining projects' labour practices have been mediated, negotiated, or resisted by mine workers, unionists, and human resource managers. They discuss variations in labour practices put in place by new mining projects depending on the type of capital involved, the type of mine being developed, and their location. Finally, the book examines the implications of power dynamics surrounding companies' labour strategies from the broader perspective of the responsibility of trade unions, gender equality, and identity politics.
Ladan Affi
Women & Peacebuilding in Africa
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A key book for conflict and peace studies, reveals the gendered nature of peacebuilding, its consequences, and the importance of women playing a part in peace processes in Africa.
Even in the best of circumstances, women are all too often excluded from formal peacemaking and peacebuilding processes and relegated to the sidelines as observers or limited to informal peacebuilding strategies. Yet there is enormous potential in these strategies as women often strive to build bridges across political, ethnic, religious, clan and other differences through alliances arising from common concerns around violence, land, access to resources, and protection of their families and communities, and address sources of conflict at both national and local levels. Drawing on cutting-edge research by scholars and women's rights activists in South Sudan, Sudan, Algeria, northern Nigeria, and Somalia, this book focuses on the consequences of the continuing exclusions of women from peace talks and from post-conflict governance structures. The case studies reveal how peacebuilding is gendered and why this matters in developing meaningful and sustainable approaches to peacebuilding. Examining how women activists have made a difference through informal peacebuilding activities, the contributors explore women's efforts to reshapethe post-conflict context by struggling for legislative and constitutional reforms and by advocating for political representation and political inclusion more generally within peacebuilding processes. They also look at how women have pushed back against the conservative Islamist forces that today dominate much armed conflict in Africa. Suggesting that women's formal participation in peace negotiations is vital in bringing about an end to conflict and preventing its resumption, as well as the one of the most effective strategies, this book will be essential reading for scholars and NGOs involved in development, conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
The book is the product of a research project on Women and Peacebuilding in Africa, funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
Arthur Terry
A Companion to Catalan Literature
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The first and only guide in English to the influential body of Catalan literature, from the middle ages to the present day.
This book is the only one of its kind in English. Part literary history, part literary criticism, it is above all a personal assessment of a rich and important body of work which is still not widely known outside Catalonia. Catalan literature, one of the three major Peninsular literatures, reached an impressive level of excellence in the middle ages, beginning with Ramon Llull and the chronicles, and culminating in the two great fifteenth-century writers,the poet Ausiàs March and Joanot Martorell, the author of Tirant lo Blanc, one of the landmarks in early prose fiction. After three centuries of relative eclipse, the nineteenth-century Renaixença produced a distinctive version of Romanticism with notable achievements in poetry, theatre and the novel. More recently, Catalan writers have successfully assimilated a number of international tendencies, from Symbolism to Surrealism, while remaining deeply aware of the possibilities of the Catalan language itself. After the cultural disruption caused by the Civil War of 1936-39 and its aftermath, Catalan literature has once again shown its capacity for self-renewal,and the present literary scene is one of great interest and originality. The book does not presuppose any knowledge of Catalan; all quotations and book titles are translated, and a list of works translated into English is included.
ARTHUR TERRY is Emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of Essex.
Este libro queda sin paralelo en inglés. Una combinación de historia y crítica literarias, es ante todo una valoración personal de una literatura rica e importante que todavía queda poco conocida fuera de Cataluña. La literatura catalana consiguió un nivel de excelencia impresionante en la Edad Media y, a partir de su restablecimiento a principios del siglo diecinueve, ha demostrado una capacidad extraordinaria de autorenovación que todavía persiste hoy en día. Este libro no presupone saber catalán; cada cita y título de libro queda traducido, y se incluye una lista de obrastraducidas al inglés.
Alexander W Samson
A Companion to Lope de Vega
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An assessment of the life, work and reputation of Spain's leading Golden Age dramatist
A Companion to Lope de Vega brings together essays by leading international scholars on the life and works of Lope de Vega Carpio, the 'fénix de los ingenios', or, as his rival Miguel de Cervantes dubbed him, 'monstruo de la naturaleza'. Spain's foremost Golden Age playwright excelled in all literary genres, including prose and poetry, also covered here. The contributors evaluate current critical debates and issues in Lope de Vega studies, as well as providing new readings of key texts. It has been the aim of the editors to do justice to the variety, profusion and originality of Lope's work, placing the writer and his output firmly in their historical context as well asassessing his reputation in literary history. The wide variety of critical perspectives found in the volume reflects the liveliness of the debate surrounding this enduringly popular figure whose drama is enjoying a renaissance intheatres around the globe.
Alexander Samson lectures in Golden Age literature at University College London. Jonathan Thacker is Fellow in Spanish at Merton College, Oxford.
Other Contributors: Elaine Canning, Geraldine Coates, Frederick A de Armas, Victor Dixon, Geraint Evans, Tyler Fisher, Edward H. Friedman, Alejandro Garcia Reidy, David Johnston, Arantza Mayo, David McGrath, Barbara Mujica, Ali Rizavi José Maria Ruano de la Haza,Isabel Torres, Xavier Tubau, Duncan Wheeler.
Raymond Leslie Williams
A Companion to Gabriel García Márquez
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One of the major Latin American writers of the twentieth century.
This book offers discussion and analysis of the subtle writing of Nobel Laureate Gabriel García Márquez - a traditionalist who draws from classic Western texts, a Modernist committed to modernizing the conservative literary tradition in Colombia and Latin America, an internationally recognized major writer of the 1960s Boom, the key figure in popularizing what has been called "magic realism" and, finally, a Modernist who has occasionally engaged in some ofthe strategies of the postmodern. The author demonstrates that García Márquez is above all a committed and highly accomplished Modernist fiction writer who has successfully synthesized his political vision in his writing and absorbed a vast array of cultural and literary traditions. Drawing on García Márquez's interviews with Williams and others over the years, the book also explores the importance of the non-literary, the presence of oral tradition and the visual arts, thus providing a more complete insight into García Márquez's strategies as a Modernist with heterogeneous aesthetic interests, as well as an understanding of his social and political preoccupations.
RAYMOND LESLIE WILLIAMS is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Riverside.
Kenneth King
India's Development Diplomacy & Soft Power in Africa
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Unpacks the histories, actors and geopolitics of India's soft power and evolving engagements with Africa.
Since independence India has deployed its soft power in Africa, with educational aid and capacity-building at the heart of its Africa policy. However, following economic liberalisation and in a quest for greater global influence, India's geopolitics have changed. The country's discourse on Africa has shifted from the mantras of post-colonial solidarity and South-South Cooperation, and there is now a growing sense of Indian exceptionalism, as the country reimagines its past and future against the growing influence of the political right. In this book scholars from India, Africa, Europe and North America show how India's soft power has been implemented by the diaspora, government and private sector. Research documents how India's 'aid' has been re-thought in major schemes such as e-global education and health, Gandhi statuary and Covid-19 diplomacy in Africa.
Nicholas Westcott
Imperialism and Development
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A compelling exploration of one of the most ill-advised and calamitous interventions in colonial development history.
As colonial development took off after the Second World War, in the context of national food shortages, Britain's Labour Government initiated the Groundnut Scheme, an extraordinarily ambitious project to convert 3 million acres of bush in Tanganyika into the largest mechanized groundnut farm in the world. It was to prove the largest, most expensive and most disastrous development scheme ever undertaken by the British Government. Never previously analysed in depth, the author draws on a wide range of sources to discuss the political dynamics that drove the Groundnut Scheme forward, despite the gravest doubts of agriculturalists and economists, why it went wrong, and what its impact has been since on the practice of economic development. Initially employing the United Africa Company as agent, the government set up an Overseas Food Corporation to manage the Groundnut Scheme as an example of socialist development in Africa. Army surplus kit and demobbed soldiers poured into the country and were sent up the railway line to Kongwa to beat the bush. By the time the effort was abandoned in 1950, costs had risen to a colossal 36 million - equivalent to over 1 billion today - and yet almost no groundnuts had been exported. The prototype of many large-scale, government-run, high-cost development projects that failed to deliver, the Groundnut Scheme was perhaps the first major failure of agricultural development in Africa, and its legacy in development practice still with us today.
Stephen M. Hart and Jorge Cornejo Polar
César Vallejo
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Do you know when César Vallejo was born? Was he a communist or a lapsed Catholic, or both? Do you know what he died of? Did you know that a new collection of hand-written manuscripts has been recently discovered in Montevideo? You may not know the answer to all these questions (some of them may be unanswerable) but this book will help you to identify and compare the competing answers. It describes and evaluates the manuscripts, editions, books, collections of essays, articles, translations, and doctoral theses written about Vallejo by a wealth of scholars since Vallejo's death on Good Friday 1938.
Jeremy Lind
Land, Investment & Politics
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Examines the new challenges facing Africa's pastoral drylands from large-scale investments and how this might affect the economic and political landscape for the regions affected and their peoples.
More than ever before, the gaze of global investment has been directed to the drylands of Africa, but what does this mean for these regions' pastoralists and other livestock-keepers and their livelihoods? Will those who have occupied drylands over generations benefit from the developments, as claimed, or is this a new type of territorialisation, exacerbating social inequality? This book's detailed local studies of investments at various stages of development - from Kenya, Tanzania, Somaliland, Ethiopia - explore, for the first time, how large land, resource and infrastructure projects shape local politics and livelihoods. Land and resources use, based on ancestral precedenceand communal practices, and embedded regional systems of trade, are unique to these areas, yet these lands are now seen as the new frontier for development of national wealth. By examining the ways in which large-scale investmentsenmesh with local political and social relations, the chapters show how even the most elaborate plans of financiers, contractors and national governments come unstuck and are re-made in the guise of not only states' grand modernist visions, but also those of herders and small-town entrepreneurs in the pastoral drylands. The contributors also demonstrate how and why large-scale investments have advanced in a more piecemeal way as the challenges of implementation have mounted.
JEREMY LIND is Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex. DORIS OKENWA holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics. IAN SCOONES is a Professorial Fellow at the IDS, University of Sussex and co-director of the ESRC STEPS Centre.
Charles Davis
Actividad teatral en la región de Madrid según los protocolos de Juan García de Albertos, 1634-1660: I
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Surviving theatrical contracts throw light on the remarkable degree of theatrical activity throughout 17c Spain.
In 1639 the Madrid notary Juan García de Albertos was appointed Escribano de la Comisión de las comedias - official theatre notary. His annual registers of contracts (protocolos) contain more than two thousand items related to actors and theatrical activity from 1634 to 1660. This exceptionally rich collection of documents offers a fascinating overview of theatrical life, in all its diversity, in Madrid and the surrounding area during the age of Calderón. Especially plentiful are the contracts for performances at festivities in towns and villages, both by professional companies and by local amateurs assisted by individual actresses and musicians hired in Madrid. This extraordinary degree of theatrical activity in even the smallest communities, almost entirely neglected hitherto, forces us to revise and expand our conventional picture of the Spanish Golden Age theatre. The collection also reveals in abundant detail the composition and working practices of acting companies, especially in the numerous asientos (actors' employment contracts), as well as transport conditions, costume hire, staging practices and repertory. The actors' convoluted and often precarious finances are an ever-present theme. The documents are accompanied by appendices and maps, and the extensive introduction provides an exhaustive survey of what can be learned from this remarkable source. CHARLES DAVIS was formerly Lecturer in Spanish at Queen Mary, University of London, and is currently a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at the University of Valencia. The late J. E. VAREYwas Professor of Spanish at the University of London and Principal of Westfield College. For description in Spanish see Volume II. Actividad Teatral en la Región de Madrid is published in TWO VOLUMES (I: ISBN 1855660628, II ISBN 1855660792) WHICH MUST BE PURCHASED AS A SET.
Carlota Caulfield
A Companion to US Latino Literatures
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A panorama of literature by Latinos, whether born or resident in the United States.
This volume, documenting the linguistic and cultural diversity of Latino literary output in the United States, offers an exciting introduction for non-specialist readers. Unique in its scope and perspective, it focuses on variousliterary genres, and cinema, related to Latinos. Each essay considers not only Latino writers who were born or raised in the United States, but also Latin American writers who took up residence in the United States but may also beconsidered part of the literary scene of their countries of origin. Rather than follow one specific mode of organization and presentation, each contributor has offered his or her original perspective on the subject matter or theme. The result is an inclusive spectrum of the voices of the U.S. Latin American diaspora, illuminating the rich and complex culture of Latinos.
Carlota Caulfield is Professor of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies at Mills College, California. Darién J. Davis is Associate Professor of History and Latin American Studies at Middlebury College, Vermont.
CONTRIBUTORS: Eva Bueno, Carlota Caulfield, Elizabeth Coonrod Martínez, DariénJ. Davis, Jorge Febles, Lydia Gil, Armando González-Pérez, Patricia M. Montilla, Vincent Spina, Antonio Tosta, Sergio Waisman
Francesc Eiximenis
Francesc Eiximenis
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A selection from the works of the Catalan Franciscan, Francesc Eiximenis.
Francesc Eiximenis is an outstanding figure in the ranks of the mendicant orders who, in the late Middle Ages, strove to educate the lower echelons of society. Born in Gerona, around 1330, probably to a comfortable middle-class family, Eiximenis entered the Franciscan order at a very early age, studied in Oxford, and probably also in Paris, and obtained the degree of master of theology in Toulouse. Later he combined teaching with the composing of his works. Among these stands out the monumental and widely known Lo Crestià (The Christian), in which Eiximenis aimed to include all contemporary university knowledge, adapted for a lay public whose basic level of instruction was far below that of clerics. The same didactic purpose is seen in the Libro de los ángeles (Book of the Angels), the Libro de las mujeres (Book of the Women) and the Vita Christi. Eiximenis, by then bishop of Elna, died in 1409. Among the many themes that recur in his extensive literary production, this anthology concentrates on his ideas on the transmission of knowledge, on education and on culture. The introduction and selection of texts is by David Guixeras and Xavier Renedo.
ROBERT D. HUGHES is a translator and researcher with particular expertise in the fields of fine art, the history of ideas and Catalan culture. Published in association with Editorial Barcino
J.E. Varey
Los Libros de Cuentas de los Corrales de Comedias de Madrid: 1706-1719
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An edition of the earliest surviving account books of the two public playhouses of Madrid, giving the daily repertoire, takings and expenses.The latter include detailed information on scenery, actors and sundry minor repairs to the theatres, as well as the daily payment to the Royal Hospice, from which the size of the audience can be calculated.The introduction, includes database analysis of the accounts, and alphabetical index of plays performed.
Simon Gikandi
Ngugi
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First-hand accounts of how Ngugi wa Thiong'o's life and work have intersected, and the multiple forces that have converged to make him one of the greatest writers to come out of Africa in the twentieth century.
This collection of essays reflects on the life and work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who celebrated his 80th birthday in 2018. Drawing from a wide range of contributors, including writers, critics, publishers and activists, the volume traces the emergence of Ngugi as a novelist in the early 1960s, his contribution to the African culture of letters at its moment of inception, and his global artistic life in the twenty-first century. Here we have both personal andcritical reflections on the different phases of the writer's life: there are poems from friends and admirers, commentaries from his co-workers in public theatre in Kenya in the 1970s and 1980s, and from his political associates in the fight for democracy, and contributions on his role as an intellectual of decolonization, as well as his experiences in the global art world. Included also are essays on Ngugi's role outside the academy, in the world of education, community theatre, and activism. In addition to tributes from other authors who were influenced by Ngugi, the collection contains hitherto unknown materials that are appearing in English for the first time. Both a celebration of the writer, and a rethinking of his legacy, this book brings together three generations of Ngugi readers. We have memories and recollections from the people he worked with closely in the 1960s, the students that he taught atthe University of Nairobi in the 1970s, his political associates during his exile in the 1980s, and the people who worked with him as he embarked on a new life and career in the United States in the 1990s. First-hand accounts reveal how Ngugi's life and work have intersected, and the multiple forces that have converged to make him one of the greatest writers to come out of Africa in the twentieth century.
Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University. He is President of the MLA and was editor of its journal PMLA, from 2011-2016. Ndirangu Wachanga is Professor of Media Studies and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin. He is also the authorized documentary biographer of Professors Ali A. Mazrui, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Micere Mugo.
Stefano Bellucci, Andreas Eckert
General Labour History of Africa
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The first comprehensive and authoritative history of work and labour in Africa; a key text for all working on African Studies and Labour History worldwide.
Co-published with the International Labour Organization on the centenary of its founding in 1919, the General Labour History of Africa is a landmark in the study of labour history. It brings, for the first time, an African perspective within a global context to the study of labour and labour relations. The volume analyses key developments in the 20th century, such as the emergence of free wage labour; the transformation in labour relations; the role of capital and employers; labour agency and movements; the growing diversity of formal and informal or precarious labour; the meaning of work; and the impact of gender and age on the workplace. The contributors - eminent historians, anthropologists and social scientists from Africa, Europe and the United States - examine African labour in the context of labour and social issues worldwide: mobility and colonial and postcolonial migration, child and forced labour, security, the growth of entrepreneurial labour, the informal sector and self-employment, and the impact of trade unionism, welfare and state relations. The book discusses key sectors such as mining, agriculture, industry, transport, domestic work, and sport, tourism and entertainment, as well as the international dimension and the history and impact of the International Labour Organization itself. This authoritative and comprehensive work will be aninvaluable resource for historians of labour, social relations and African history.
In association with the ILO Regional Office for Africa
Stefano Bellucci is senior researcher at the International Instituteof Social History, Amsterdam, and lecturer in African History and Economy at Leiden University, the Netherlands; Andreas Eckert is Director of the International Research Centre for Work and the Human Life Cycle in Global History and professor of African history at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
Steven L. Robins
From Revolution to Rights in South Africa
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The author argues for the continued importance of NGOs, social movements and other 'civil society' actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy in South Africa.
Critics of liberalism in Europe and North America argue that a stress on 'rights talk' and identity politics has led to fragmentation, individualisation and depoliticisation. But are these developments really signs of 'the end ofpolitics'? In the post-colonial, post-apartheid, neo-liberal new South Africa poor and marginalised citizens continue to struggle for land, housing and health care. They must respond to uncertainty and radical contingencies on a daily basis. This requires multiple strategies, an engaged, practised citizenship, one that links the daily struggle to well organised mobilisation around claiming rights. Robins argues for the continued importance of NGOs, socialmovements and other 'civil society' actors in creating new forms of citizenship and democracy. He goes beyond the sanitised prescriptions of 'good governance' so often touted by development agencies. Instead he argues for a complex, hybrid and ambiguous relationship between civil society and the state, where new negotiations around citizenship emerge. Steven L. Robins is Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Stellenbosch and editorof Limits to Liberation after Apartheid (James Currey). Southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland): University of KwaZulu-Natal Press (PB)
Gwynne Edwards
A Companion to Luis Buñuel
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Luis Buñuel was one of the great film-makers of the twentieth century. Gwynne Edwards analyses his work in the context of Buñuel's personal obsessions - sex, bourgeois values and religion.
Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was one of the truly great film-makers of the twentieth century. Shaped by a repressive Jesuit education and a bourgeois family background, he reacted against both, escaped to Paris, and was soon embraced by André Breton's official surrealist group. His early films are his most aggressive and shocking, the slicing of the eyeball in Un Chien andalou (1929) one of the most memorable episodes in the history of cinema. The Forgotten Ones (1950) and He (1952), made in Mexico, were followed, from 1960, in Spain and France, by the films for which he is best known: Viridiana (1961), Belle de jour (1966), Tristana (1970), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Gwynne Edwards analyses the films in the context of Buñuel's personal obsessions - sex, bourgeois values, and religion - suggesting that the film-maker experienced a degree of sexual inhibition surprising in a surrealist.
GWYNNE EDWARDS is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
Tsehai Berhane-Selassie
Ethiopian Warriorhood
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The history of the often-overlooked chewa Ethiopian warriors and their crucial role in defending their homeland against invasion, as well as their strong influence on political identity and the social infrastructure.
Today best known for their role in defending Ethiopia from Italian invasion 1935-41, chewa warriors protected Ethiopia for centuries. Yet, depicted by some 19th-century Western observers as little more than "a horde" of warmongers, and later suppressed by Ethiopian monarchs who sought to create a centralized modern state, their contribution has been neglected. Drawing on oral and written sources, as well as the zeraf poetry through which theyexpressed themselves, this book explores for the first time in depth the history, practices and principles of warriorhood of the chewa, and their wider influence on society and state. Often self-trained individuals who began by defending their communities, by the end of the 19th century there were chewa warrior groups from almost all linguistic groups who fought together to resist foreign invaders. Some chewa enrolled in the service of the Ethiopian "kings of kings", who organized them as named corps that supplemented the formal defence of the state. Today, chewa political identity, which transcended social, familial, political and other groupings, remains deeply rooted in Ethiopian society.
Kenneth Good
Diamonds, Dispossession and Democracy in Botswana
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Analyses the limits to democracy in Botswana.
Is Botswana still 'an African miracle'? Thanks to diamonds the country's growth rate was the highest in the world into the 1990s, and regular parliamentary elections judged free on polling day have been held since 1965. However aduopoly of presidentialism and ruling party preponderance has stimulated arrogance, complacency and corruption among the country's rulers. What is 'perpetual democracy'? The ruling BDP is kept in perpetual power by the first-past-the post election system. The President in Botswana is empowered to do whatever he pleases. President Mogae has amended the constitution to ensure the automatic succession of the Vice-President General Ian Khama, the son of Seretse and Ruth Khama.A new Directorate of Intelligence Services provides closer control of power. Why are the Khoisan confined to 'a gulag of special settlements'? The expulsion of the San from Central Kalahari Game Reservewas relentlessly enforced in 1997 and 2002. A multi-cultural coalition asserts that the government is implementing 'a philosophy of cultural genocide on the non-Tswana tribes'. How can the gift of diamonds be turned to reform? Professor Good asserts the need to strengthen and democratise the electoral and voting systems. He sees diversification as essential to reduce the dependency on diamonds. He urges the use of mineral wealth to reduce the gap between rich and poor; half of the population are at present in poverty in a rich country.
KENNETH GOOD was Professor of Politics at the University of Botswana when he was expelled from the country.
South Africa: Jacana
Noël Valis
Leopoldo Alas [Clarín]
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Novelist-critic Leopoldo Alas's reputation suffered neglect and silent reproval during much of the twentieth century, especially under the Franco regime, but his reputation has now achieved classic status in Spain. Clearly relatedto this is the great increase in the number of translations - Julian Barnes called La Regenta 'the foreign classic tardily discovered'. This bibliography picks up where the first one left off in 1984. It is divided into primary material and secondary material. Primary material includes: Anthologies and Selections; Criticism; Novels; Short Story Collections; Plays; Correspondence; Prologues; Reprints; Translations; and Miscellaneous, with two new categories: autograph manuscripts and iconography.
Jeff D. Grischow
Disability Rights and Inclusiveness in Africa
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Grassroots researchers examine the barriers and ways of implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in Africa.
Many have praised the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), first adopted by the UN in 2006, as a revolutionary step towards disability rights in Africa. But how real is the progress towards equality for persons with physical disabilities, mental health difficulties, blindness, deafness or albinism? What are the barriers to the CRPD's successful implementation on the continent, and how might we enforce inclusiveness and equality among those disadvantaged? This book brings together the findings of researchers in Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa to offer grassroots' perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of achieving disability rights under the CRPD. Challenging the generally optimistic view presented to date, the contributors provide evidence-based trenchant critiques of the Convention, highlight the ways in which disability rights are interpreted in varying contexts and with different disabilities, and examine particular issues in relation to children and women. Finally, the contributors suggest ways of moving forward and achieving disability rights in Africa.
Stephen Boyd
A Companion to Cervantes's Novelas Ejemplares
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This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading Cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership.
This edited volume of fourteen specially commissioned essays written from a variety of critical perspectives by leading cervantine scholars seeks to provide an overview of Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares which will be of interest to a broad academic readership. An extensive general Introduction places the Novelas in the context of Cervantes's life and work; provides basic information about their content, composition, internal ordering, publication, and critical reception, gives detailed consideration to the contemporary literary-theoretical issues implicit in the title, and outlines and contributes to the key critical debates on their variety, unity, exemplarity,and supposed "hidden mystery". After a series of chapters on the individual stories, the volume concludes with two survey essays devoted, respectively, to the understanding of eutrapelia implicit in the Novelas, andto the dynamics of the character pairing that is one of their salient features. Detailed plot summaries of each of the stories, and a Guide to Further Reading are supplied as appendices.
Stephen Boyd is a lecturer in the Department of Hispanic Studies of University College Cork.
Douglas Kelly
Chrétien de Troyes
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The supplement to the 1976 original bibliography reflects the expanding scope of modern Chrétien studies, including items from around the world, with the assistance of an international team of scholars.
The Supplement builds on and completes the Chrétien de Troyes Bibliography first published in 1976. Together the two volumes constitute the fullest and most complete bibliographical source now available on this major medieval author. Chrétien de Troyes bequeathed a corpus of highly original and widely influential Arthurian romances. Indeed, his direct or indirect influence continued throughout the middle ages and beyond into modern times. The Bibliographypermits students of medieval romance to quickly identify the areas in which Chrétien scholarship has been active. Items are listed under twenty-two topics, with numerous sub-sections under each topic, and cross-references for items that treat more than one of the topics. The broad geographic and linguistic scope of modern Chrétien studies is evident in items not only from western Europe and North America, but also from the growing body of medieval scholarship in eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Australasia. To ensure accuracy and completeness, the editor has been assisted by scholars competent in the many languages in which Chrétien studies are now published, most notably in Japanese, Welsh, Rumanian, Hungarian and Polish, as well as by other scholars and librarians who generously provided assistance and information in finding items difficult to access.
Ernest N Emenyonu
A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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A critical examination of the engaging voice and multiple stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on war, feminism, art, ideology, hair, complex human identities and the challenges of multicultural existence.
Easily the leading and most engaging voice of her era and generation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has bridged gaps and introduced new motifs and narrative styles which have energized contemporary African fiction since her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003). With Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) and The Thing Around Your Neck - Short Stories (2009), she established herself as a preeminent story-teller. Americanah (2013), with ingeniouscraftsmanship addresses the sensitive themes of passionate love, independence, freedom and moral responsibility with extravagant and versatile narrative innovations.
Through her writings, she has made herself relevant topeople of all ages - across racial and linguistic boundaries. Her talks, blogs, musings on social media, essays and commentaries, workshop-mentoring for budding young writers, lecture circuit discourses, all enrich her imaginativecreativity as they expand and define her mission as a writer. "We Should All be Feminists" she proclaimed in an essay, giving feminism a "tweak and twist" and suggesting new outlooks in literary theory.
Her contributionsto African, Diasporic and World literatures deserve serious analyses, commentaries and interpretations, and this Companion to her work critically examines her creative outputs from her art and ideology, from feminism to war, to matters of myth and perception, and the challenges of multicultural existence and complex human identities.
Charles Davis
Actividad teatral en la región de Madrid según los protocolos de Juan García de Albertos, 1634-1660: II
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En 1639 el escribano madrileño Juan García de Albertos fue nombrado Escribano de la Comisión de las comedias. Sus protocolos notariales contienen más de 2.000 escrituras relacionadas con actores y actividad teatral de 1634 a 1660.Esta riquísima colección ofrece un fascinante panorama de la vida teatral de Madrid y su comarca, en toda su diversidad, durante la época de Calderón. Son especialmente abundantes los contratos de representaciones en fiestas de pueblos, tanto por parte de compañías profesionales como de aficionados locales con la ayuda de actrices y músicos individuales contratados en Madrid. La extraordinaria cantidad de actividad teatral que se llevaba a cabo hasta en las poblaciones más pequeñas -fenómeno casi totalmente ignorado hasta ahora- nos obliga a revisar y ampliar nuestra imagen convencional del teatro áureo español. La colección revela también, con todo lujo de detalles, lan y el funcionamiento de las compañías de actores, además de las condiciones de su transporte, el alquiler de vestidos, las prácticas escénicas y el repertorio. Tema omnipresente son los enrevesados problemas económicos de landula. Los documentos vienen acompañados de apéndices y mapas, y de una extensa introducción en la que se analiza exhaustivamente lo que podemos aprender de esta valiosa fuente documental.
CHARLES DAVIS fue anteriormenteprofesor de español de Queen Mary, Universidad de Londres, y es ahora investigador por el programa Ramón y Cajal en la Universitat de València. J. E. VAREY fue catedrático de español de la Universidad de Londres y Rector de Westfield College. For description in English see Volume I. Actividad Teatral en la Región de Madrid is published in TWO VOLUMES (I: ISBN 1855660628, II ISBN 1855660792) WHICH MUST BE PURCHASED AS A SET.
José Antonio de Armona
Memorias cronológicas sobre el origen de la representación de comedias en España (año de 1785)
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Una nueva edición de la primera historia sistemática del teatro en España.
Esta nueva edición de las Memorias cronológicas de José Antonio de Armona ofrece por primera vez un análisis pormenorizado de las fuentes documentales empleadas por el autor, que constituyen su aportación más fundamentlos estudios teatrales. La obra de Armona es la primera historia sistemática del teatro en España, desde el final de la Edad Media hasta su propia época. Aunque incluye una visión general de la literatura dramática del Siglo de Oro, se centra principalmente en los aspectos institucionales del teatro. En su calidad de Corregidor de Madrid, le correspondía a Armona el cargo de Juez Protector, máxima autoridad de la administración de los teatros públicos y los actores, y la mayor parte de sus Memorias se dedica a este tema. Habiendo reflexionado sobre su experiencia como Protector y los problemas planteados por conflictos jurisdiccionales en este ámbito, Armona examinó sus orígenes y evolución mediante extensas investigaciones en los archivos municipales de Madrid, reuniendo y recopilando una nutrida colección de documentos que aclaran múltiples aspectos de la historia teatral. Por tanto, sus Memorias están estrechamente relacionadas con la documentación municipal publicada en tomos anteriores de las Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en España, y deben situarse en este contexto.
En español xiv+352 pp., 8 ilus.b/n Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en España, XIV
CHARLES DAVIS es Honorary Research Fellow de Queen Mary, Universidad de Londres.
Miles Larmer
Across the Copperbelt
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The first comparative historical analysis - local, national and transnational - of the cross-border Central African copperbelt; a key work in studies of labour, urbanisation and African studies.
The Central African Copperbelt, encompassing the mining communities of Katanga (DR Congo) and Zambia, has been central to the study of modernisation and rapid social and political change in urban Africa. This volume expands upon earlier studies of industrial mining, male-dominated formal labour organisation and political change by examining both sides of the border from pre-colonial history to the present and encompassing a wide range of economic, social and cultural identities and activities. Bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, the contributors explore copperbelt communities' sense of identity - expressed in comic strips and football matches, their precarious and inventive ways of living, their involvement in church and education, and the processes and impact of urbanisation and development, environmental degradation and changing gender relations. A major contribution to borderland studies, in showing how the meaning and relevance of the border to the copperbelt's mixed and mobile population has changed constantly over time, the book's engagement with communities at the nexus of social, economic and political change makes it a key study for those working in global urban development.
This book is available under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC. It is based on research that is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no: 681657): 'Comparing the Copperbelt: Political Culture and Knowledge Production in Central Africa'.
Julian Brown
The Road to Soweto
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A new history of the 1976 Soweto Uprising and the events leading to it in the preceding decade, that will transform our understanding of the historical evolution of the struggle against apartheid.
This revisionary account of the Soweto Uprising of June 1976 and the decade preceding it transforms our understanding of what led to this crucial flashpoint of South Africa's history. Brown argues that far from there being "quiescence" following the Sharpeville Massacre and the suppression of African opposition movements, during which they went underground, this period was marked by experiments in resistance and attempts to develop new forms of politics that prepared the ground for the Uprising. Students at South Africa's segregated universities began to re-organise themselves as a political force; new ideas about race reinvigorated political thought; debates around confrontation shaped the development of new forms of protest. The protest then began to move off university campuses and onto the streets: through the independent actions of workers in Durban, and attempts by students to link their struggles with a broader agenda. These actions made protest public once again, and helped establish the patterns of popular action and state response that would come to shape the events in Soweto on 16 June 1976.
Julian Brown is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana
'throws new light on the background to the Soweto Uprising, providing insight into white and black student politics, worker protest and broader dissent' - William Beinart, University of Oxford
'an extremely important contribution to the historiography on protest in South Africa. It links black and white student protests (too often studied in isolation from one another) to workers' movements by looking at the changing forms of protest during the 1960s and 1970s, and the apartheid government's changing responses.' - Anne Heffernan, University of the Witwatersrand
'By showing how the Soweto Uprising served as a precursor for later historical and political events, the author convincingly shows the continuity from one from one protest and decade to the next.' - Dawne Curry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Yusuf M. Juwayeyi
Archaeology and Oral Tradition in Malawi
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First comprehensive account of the origins and early history of the Chewa as revealed by oral tradition and archaeology that allows a more accurate picture of a pre-literate society.
The Chewa are the largest ethnic group in Malawi, representing a third of the population of approximately 19 million, and their language - Chichewa - is Malawi's national language. Yet the last book on the history of this group was published in 1944, and was based on oral history, or tradition. As with much African history, oral history started to be recorded only in the late 19th century. This is the first book to use not only oral history, but also documents written by early Portuguese explorers, traders and government officials, as well as archaeology, to piece together the early history of the Chewa. The author is an archaeologist, who discovered the first major Chewa settlement, Mankhamba, near the southern part of Lake Malawi. His excavations have enabled a more scientific chronology of the migrations of the Chewa into what is today Malawi and have provided physical proof of their early history as well as their material and spiritual culture and way of life. Professor Yusuf Juwayeyi has written and documented a very readable history and description of archaeology, which reveals the value of combining oral tradition together with archaeology to arrive at a more accurate picture of the history of a pre-literate society. This book will be of value not only to historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, but also the general reader interested in African history.
YUSUF M. JUWAYEYI is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York.
South Africa: UCT Press
Robin Law
Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa
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Re-envisages what we know about African political economies through its examination of one of the key questions in colonial and African history, that of commercial agriculture and its relationship to slavery.
This book considers commercial agriculture in Africa in relation to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the institution of slavery within Africa itself, from the beginnings of Afro-European maritime trade in the fifteenth century to the early stages of colonial rule in the twentieth century. For Europeans, the export of agricultural produce represented a potential alternative to the slave trade from the outset and there was recurrent interest in establishing plantations in Africa or in purchasing crops from African producers. This idea gained greater currency in the context of the movement for the abolition of the slave trade from the late eighteenth century onwards, when the promotion of commercial agriculture in Africa was seen as a means of suppressing the slave trade. Robin Law is Emeritus Professor of African History, University of Stirling; Suzanne Schwarz is Professor of History, University ofWorcester; Silke Strickrodt is a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham.
Martin Banham
African Theatre 8: Diasporas
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This volume in the African Theatre series celebrates the African theatrical diaspora from Brazil to Tasmania, and Canada to Cuba, and also includes the playscript Messing with the Mind by Egyptian writer and director Khaled El-Sawy.
Diasporas', as used in the title of this volume, refers to a multitude of groups and communities with widely differing histories, identities and current locations. This book brings together essays on theatre by people of Africandescent in North America, Cuba, Italy, the UK, Israel and Tasmania. Several chapters present overviews of particular national contexts, others offer insights into play texts or specific performances. Offering a mix of academic andpractitioner's points of views, Volume 8 in the African Theatre series analyses and celebrates various aspects of African diasporic theatre worldwide.
Guest Editors: CHRISTINE MATZKE, Lecturer in African Literatures and Cultures, Humboldt-University, Berlin; and OSITA OKAGBUE, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies,University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds;Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Donald L. Shaw
A Companion to Modern Spanish American Fiction
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A comprehensive survey of Spanish American fiction as it has eveolved through successive phases.
With such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Ángel Asturias and Gabriel García Márquez (both the latter Nobel Prizewinners) Spanish American fiction is now unquestionably an integral part of the mainstream of Western literature.This book draws on the most recent research in describing the origins and development of narrative in Spanish America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracing the pattern from Romanticism and Realism, through Modernismo, Naturalism and Regionalism to the Boom and beyond. It shows how, while seldom moving completely away from satire, social criticism and protest, Spanish American fiction has evolved through successive phases in which both the conceptions of the writer's task and presumptions about narrative and reality have undergone radical alterations. DONALD SHAW holds the Brown Forman Chair of Spanish American literature in the University of Virginia.
Eldred Jones
ALT 12 New Writing, New Approaches: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
In his Editorial to African Literature Today 12, first published in 1982, Eldred Jones laments the death of Camara Laye and gives tribute to him as one of the pioneers of African literature. The volume celebrates new writers whose works "have not received much critical attention either because they are relatively new, or because not being what might be described as mainstream they may unintentionally, perhaps, have been damned with faint praise or neglect." There are contributions on the works of Gabriel Okara, Robert Serumaga, Hamidou Kane and John Munonye, and emerging as significant new voices are playwrights Femi Osofisan and Ola Rotimi, and feminist writer Mariama Bâ.
Professor Abdul Raufu Mustapha
Turning Points in African Democracy
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A team of scholars examine the radical political changes that have taken place since 1990 in eleven key countries in Africa.
Radical changes have taken place in Africa since 1990. What are the realities of these changes? What significant differences have emerged between African countries? What is the future for democracy in the continent? The editors have chosen eleven key countries to provide enlightening comparisons and contrasts to stimulate discussion among students. They have brought together a team of scholars who are actively working in the changing Africa of today.Each chapter is structured around a framing event which defines the experience of democratisation. The editors have provided an overview of the turning points in African politics. They engage with debates on how to study andevaluate democracy in Africa, such as the limits of elections. They identify four major themes with which to examine similarities and divergences as well as to explain change and continuity in what happened in the past.
Abdul Raufu Mustapha is University Lecturer in African Politics at Queen Elizabeth House and Kirk-Greene Fellow at St Antony's College, University of Oxford; Lindsay Whitfield is a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute of International Studies, Copenhagen.
Eldred Durosimi Jones
ALT 5 The Novel in Africa: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
Originally published in 1971, this was the first volume in the series to focus on a specific theme, in this case the novel, but continues the format of including contributions from both writers and critics. There are articles on:Equiano, Onuora Nzekwu, T.M. Aluko, Ngugi, Sarif Easmon, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. The volume also includes a contribution from Ernest Emenyonu asking of African Literature "What does it take to be its critic" plus reviews of Sembene Ousmane's newly published God's Bits of Wood, Mbella Sonne Dipoko's Because of Women, T.M. Aluko's Chief, The Honourable Minister and Flora Nwapa's Idu.
Hugh Lamarque
Transport Corridors in Africa
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In-depth examination of the inherent tensions and dynamics of transport corridors in Africa: between short-term optics and long-term durability; between regional integration and national interest; between the facilitation of trade and the generation of corridor revenue.
The image of the corridor, a central pathway of road and rail carving its way through Africa's interior, has guided the coordination of transport and trade developments on the continent in recent decades. Existing analysis of the "Corridor" - a label with a great capacity to change shape, guiding funding and infrastructural priorities at different times and in different settings - tends to be presentist, technical, and conveyed in the language of transport economics. The chapters collected here showcase a more varied approach, offering perspectives from academics and policy-makers coming from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. They capture the varied forms of the corridor concept (developmental, transport, and trade corridors), the multiplicity of actors (including China and the European Union), as well as the different permutations of the infrastructure itself, in corridors linking coastal states and in others that link coastal states with the hinterland. The breadth of cases allows for a comparative perspective of East, West, and Southern Africa, as well as the basis of comparisons outside of the continent in Europe, South Asia, and elsewhere. The motivations behind corridor initiatives in Africa range enormously, from resource extraction to urban development and poverty reduction. A lot depends on scale, and this collection places the grand designs thrashed out at continental and regional economic forums alongside the individual concerns of drivers and cross-border traders hauling goods across the continent's checkpoints. What emerges are a number of central tensions in the study of transport corridors: between short-term optics and long-term durability; between road and rail as modes of transportation; between regional integration and national interest; between the facilitation of trade and the generation of corridor revenue; between different port configurations; and between local dynamics and the dynamics of long-distance transportation.
This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC.
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 29 Teaching African Literature Today
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Brings together experiences of teachers of African literature from around the world in the context of technological change.
Focuses on theoretical and pedagogical approaches to the teaching of African Literature on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. The publication of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1958 drew universal attention not only to contemporary African creative imagination, but also established the art of the modern African novel. In 1986, Wole Soyinka became the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and opened the 'gate' for other African writers. By the close of the 20th century, African Literature had gained world-wide acceptance and legitimacy in the academy and featured on the literature curriculum of schools and colleges across the globe. This specialissue of African Literature Today, examines the diverse experiences of teachers of African Literature across regional, racial, cultural and national boundaries. It explores such issues as student responses, productive pedagogical innovations, the impact of modern technology, case studies of online teaching, teaching Criticism of African Literature, and teaching African Literature in an age of multiculturalism. It is intended as an invaluable teacher's handbook and essential student companion for the effective study of African Literature.
Ernest Emenyonu is Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Michigan-Flint, USA; the editorial board is composed of scholars from US, UK and African universities
Nigeria: HEBN
Carli Coetzee
Written under the Skin
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Winner of the 2021 ALA Book of the Year Award - Scholarship
The author uses the image of blood under the skin as a way of understanding cultural and literary forms in contemporary South Africa. Chapters deal with the bloodied histories of apartheid and blood as trope for talking about change.
In this book the author argues that a younger generation of South Africans is developing important and innovative ways of understanding South African pasts, and that challenge the narratives that have over the last decades been informed by notions of forgiveness and reconciliation. The author uses the image of history-rich blood to explore these approaches to intergenerational memory. Blood under the skin is a carrier of embodied and gendered histories andusing this image, the chapters revisit older archives, as well as analyse contemporary South African cultural and literary forms. The emphasis on blood challenges the privileged status skin has had as explanatory category inthinking about identity, and instead emphasises intergenerational transfer and continuity. The argument is that a younger generation is disputing and debating the terms through which to understand contemporary South Africa, as well as for interpreting the legacies of the past that remain under the visible layer of skin. The chapters each concern blood: Mandela's prison cell as laboratory for producing bloodless freedom; the kinship relations created and resisted in accounts of Eugene de Kock in prison; Ruth First's concern with information leaks in her accounts of her time in prison; the first human-to-human heart transplant and its relation to racialised attempts to salvage whiteidentity; the #Fallist moment; Abantu book festival; and activist scholarship and creative art works that use blood as trope for thinking about change and continuity.
Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press
Joanne Tomkinson
Architecture and Politics in Africa
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Honourable Mention - 2023 ASR Prize for Best Africa-focused Anthology or Edited Collection
Innovative study of state politics, identity and buildings that sheds new light on the links between the material and the ideational realms of contemporary life in Africa.
Buildings shape politics in the ways they define communities, enable economic activity, reflect political ideas, and impact state-society relations. They are materially and symbolically interwoven with the everyday lives of elites and citizens, as well global flows of money, goods, and contracts. Yet, to date, there has been no research that explicitly connects debates about Africa's domestic and international politics with the study of architecture. This innovative book fills this gap, providing a new and compelling reading of the politics of identity in sub-Saharan Africa through an examination of some of its most significant buildings. Using case studies from nine countries across sub-Saharan Africa, this volume reveals how they are commissioned and built, how they enable elites to project power, and how they form a basis for popular conceptions of the state. Exploring a diverse range of buildings including parliaments, airports, prisons, ministries, regional institutions, libraries, universities, shopping malls, public housing, cathedrals and palaces, the contributors suggest a innovative perspective on African politics, identity and urban development. This book will be a compelling reference for scholars and students of African politics, development studies and city life in its elaboration of and challenges to established concepts and arguments about the relationship between material objects and political ideas.
This book is available as an Open Access ebook under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.
Mariana P. Candido
African Women in the Atlantic World
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An innovative and valuable resource for understanding women's roles in changing societies, this book brings together the history of Africa, the Atlantic and gender before the 20th century. It explores trade, slavery and migrationin the context of the Euro-African encounter.
HONORABLE MENTION FOR AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW BEST AFRICA-FOCUSED ANTHOLOGY OR EDITED COLLECTION, 2019
While there have been studies of women's roles in African societies and of Atlantic history, the role of women in Westand West Central Africa during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition remains relatively unexamined. This book brings together scholars from Africa, North and South America and Europe to show, for the first time,the ways in which African women participated in economic, social and political spaces in Atlantic coast societies. Focusing on diversity and change, and going beyond the study of wealthy merchant women, the contributors examine the role of petty traders and enslaved women in communities from Sierra Leone to Benguela. They analyse how women in Africa used the opportunities offered by relationships with European men, Christianity and Atlantic commerce to negotiate their social and economic positions; consider the limitations which early colonialism sought to impose on women and the strategies they employed to overcome them; the factors which fostered or restricted women's mobility,both spatially and socially; and women's economic power and its curtailment.
Mariana P. Candido is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame; Adam Jones recently retired as Professor of African History and Culture History at the University of Leipzig.
In association with The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame
Kjetil Tronvoll
The Ethiopian Red Terror Trials
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This collection analyses the approach taken by the current government of Ethiopia to deal with the massive human rights violations that took place from 1974 to 1991 under the Derg.
How was an autocratic emperor replaced by a totalitarian dictator? An unexpected popular upsurge in February 1974 made the ancien regime of Emperor Haile Selassie buckle. The Derg, a group of army officers led by an obscure and ruthless major Mengistu Hailemariam, seized power by military coup in September 1974 and removed the Emperor. What was the 'red terror'? The callous executions of members of the old regime initiated a cult of violence. The Derg were united by the shedding of blood. Search and destroy campaigns against militants led on to the full-blown 'red terror' in which thousands of the regime's opponents were brutally murdered in the streets. In what way was 'transitional justice' administered? The main officials were found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity by the Ethiopian Federal High Court and sentenced to life imprisonment. Some of the minor officialshad already been sentenced to death, whilst President Mugabe has given Mengistu Hailemariam sanctuary in Zimbabwe.
KJETIL TRONVOLL is Professor in Human Rights, Peace and Conflict Studies at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo; CHARLES SCHAEFER is Associate Professor of African History, Valparaiso University; GIRMACHEW ALEMU ANEME is a Research Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, University of Oslo.
Silke Strickrodt
Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World
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A uniquely detailed account of the dynamics of Afro-European trade in two states on the western Slave Coast over three centuries and the transition from slave trade to legitimate commerce.
From 1550 to colonial partition in the mid-1880s, trade was key to Afro-European relations on the western Slave Coast (the coastal areas of modern Togo and parts of what are now Ghana and Benin). This book looks at the commercialrelations of two states which played a crucial role in the Atlantic slave trade as well as the trade in ivory and agricultural produce: Hula, known to European traders as Grand Popo (now in Benin) and Ge, known as Little Popo (nowin Togo). Situated between the Gold Coast to the west and the eastern Slave Coast to the east, this region was an important supplier of provisions for Europeans and the enslaved Africans they purchased. Also, due to its positionin the lagoon system, it facilitated communication along the coast between the trading companies' headquarters on the western Gold Coast and their factories on the eastern Slave Coast, particularly at Ouidah, the Slave Coast's major slave port. In the 19th century, when the trade at more established ports was disrupted by the men-of-war of the British anti-slave trade squadron, the western Slave Coast became a hot-spot of illegal slave trading. Providing a detailed reconstruction of political and commercial developments in the western Slave coast, including the transition from the slave trade to legitimate commerce, this book also reveals the region's position in the wider trans-Atlantic trade network and how cross-cultural partnerships were negotiated; the trade's impact on African coastal "middlemen" communities; and the relative importance of local and global factors for the history of a region or community.
Silke Strickrodt is Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. She is co-editor (with Robin Law and Suzanne Schwarz) of Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (James Currey, 2013).
Chege Githiora
Sheng
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Of interest to linguists, artists, ma-youth, scholars of urban studies, educationalists, policy makers and language planners who are grappling with the challenges of multilingualism and language of education in Kenya.
The city of Nairobi is a rich context for the study of sociolinguistic phenomena. The coexistence of speakers of many different languages, further differentiated by socio-economic status, age and ethnicity provide conditions for the development of a mixed code such as Sheng, an urban variety of Kenyan Swahili which has morphed from a "youth language" into a vernacular of wider use. Sheng is a unique phenomenon in the study of linguistic change and innovation in an African context, a reflection of the ethnolinguistic diversity of Kenya, and language asymmetry created by socio-economic disparities. It also provides a window into understanding the processes of urban multilingualism, within the specific space structuring of Nairobi city.
This book is a detailed account of the rise and development of Sheng, its linguistic structure, social functions, and possible future directions. The author's analysis ofits presence in newspapers, TV, radio and online, makes it clear that Sheng functions as a particularly useful lens through which to explore contemporary Kenya.
Professor Abdul Raufu Mustapha
Sects & Social Disorder
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Analyses Muslim-Muslim divisions within northern Nigeria, which are as important for understanding the violence in the region as those between Muslim and Christian (for which, see the companion volume, Creed and Grievance),with consequences for long-term peacemaking.
Nigerian society has long been perceived as divided along religious lines, between Muslims and Christians, but alongside this there is an equally important polarization within the two faiths. Within the Muslim population differences in beliefs, rituals and sectarian allegiance have had profound consequences for public order. This book highlights the crucial issue of intra-Muslim pluralism and conflict in Nigeria. Conflicting interpretations of texts and contexts have led to fragmentation within northern Nigerian Islam, and different Islamic sects have often resorted to violence against each other in pursuit of "the right path". The doctrinal justification of violence was firstperfected against other Muslim groups, before being extended to non-Muslims: conflict between Muslim groups therefore preceded the violence between Muslims and Christians. It will be impossible to manage the relationship betweenthe latter, without addressing the schisms within the Muslim community itself.
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Abdul Raufu Mustapha is Associate Professor of African Politics, University of Oxford. His publications include (co-edited with Lindsey Whitfield) Turning Points in African Democracy(James Currey, 2009).
Ernest N Emenyonu
ALT 28 Film in African Literature Today
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From Hollywood to Nollywood: this issue of African Literature Today examines the relationship between film and video and the literatures of Africa.
A recent literary phenomenon in contemporary Africa is the developing relationship between film and African literature. ALT 28 focuses on the interface between film and literature in contemporary African writing and imagination. Contributors have examined the issue from a variety of perspectives: critiques of adaptations of African creative works into film, analyses of filmic structures in African dramatic literature, African writers as film makers, and the impact of the video film industry on literature and the reading culture in Africa.
Ernest N. Emenyonu is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies, University of Michigan-Flint
Nigeria: HEBN
Flora Veit-Wild
They Called You Dambudzo
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Compelling memoir of Flora Veit-Wild and her relationship with the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist Dambudzo Marechera, one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers and a significant voice in contemporary world literature.
How shall I tell our story? I hear your voice ringing in mine. I struggle to disentangle a dense tapestry of memories. One thread will be caught up in another. Early images will embrace later ones. My gaze will often be filtered through your eyes, your poems. In the end I will not always be able to tell the original from the reflection. Just as you wrote, Time's fingers on the piano / play emotion into motion / the dancers in the looking glass never recognise us as their originals. This book is a memoir with a 'double heartbeat'. At its centre is the author's relationship with the late Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, whose award-winning book The House of Hunger marked him as a powerful, disruptive, perhaps prophetic voice in African literature. Flora Veit-Wild is internationally recognised for her significant contribution to preserving Marechera's legacy. What is less known about Marechera and Veit-Wild is that they had an intense, personal and sexual relationship. This memoir explores this: the couple's first encounter in 1983, amidst the euphoria of the newly independent Zimbabwe; the tumultuous months when the homeless writer moved in with his lover and her family; the bouts of creativity once he had his own flat followed by feelings of abandonment; the increasing despair about a love affair that could not stand up against reality; and the illness of the writer and his death of HIV related pneumonia in August 1987. What follows are the struggles Flora went through once Dambudzo had died. On the one hand she became the custodian of his life and work, on the other she had to live with her own HIV infection and the ensuing threats to her health.
Jacana: Southern Africa
Ambreena Manji
The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya
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2nd Runner Up - Honorary Mention - African Studies Association of Africa - Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing Finalist for the African Studies Association's 2021 Best Book Prize.
Explores the limits of law in changing unequal land relations in Kenya.
Why, despite the introduction of new land laws beginning in 2012, has there been an increase in land grabbing in Kenya? Why has legislation failed to address long standing grievances about grossly unequal land distribution? This important book suggests that questions of justice should be central to discussions of African land reform. Constitutional reformers in Kenya promised transformative changes in land relations. However, the reality has disappointed. Land law reforms since 2010 have been more concerned with the administration of land and with bureaucratic power than with the real consequences of unequal access to land for ordinary Kenyans. Manji documents this thwarted struggle and surveys the prospects for genuine change.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University. Between 2010 and 2014, she was Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Her books include The Politics of Land Reform in Africa (2006).
Vita Books: Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and South Africa.
Joseph Hanlon
Do Bicycles Equal Development in Mozambique?
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Challenges some key assumptions of both the donors and the government about how development can be achieved in Mozambique.
Is Mozambique an African success story? It has 7 percent a year growth rate and substantial foreign investment. Fifteen years after the war of destabilisation, the peace has held. Mozambique is the donors' model pupil, carefully following their prescriptions and receiving more than a billion dollars a year in aid. The number of bicycles has doubled and this is often cited as the symbol of development. In this book the authors challenge some key assumptions of both the donors and the government and ask questions such as whether there has been too much stress on the Millennium Development Goals and too little support for economic development; if it makes sense to target thepoorest of the poor, or would it be better to target those who create the jobs which will employ the poor; whether there has been too much emphasis on foreign investment and too little on developing domestic capital; and if the private sector really will end poverty, or must there be a stronger role for the state in the economy? This book is about more than Mozambique. Mozambique is an apparent success story that is used to justify the present 'post-Washington consensus' development model. Here, the case of Mozambique is situated within the broader development debate.
Joseph Hanlon is Senior Lecturer at the Open University and the author of Beggar Your Neighbours; Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots?; and Peace without Profit (all published by James Currey) which have all made influential interventions in the development debate; Teresa Smart is Director of the London Mathematics Centre, Institute of Education.
Published in association with the Open University
Suad M.E. Musa
Hawks and Doves in Sudan's Armed Conflict
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Analyses the involvement of the agro-pastoral al-Hakkamat Baggara women of Darfur in Sudan's recent civil wars and the implications of this for conflict resolution and peacebuilding.
WINNER OF THE 2019 AIDOO-SNYDER BOOK PRIZE
Al-Hakkamat Baggara women hold an instrumental position in rural Sudan, wielding agency, social and political power. This book uncovers their significant, but widely overlooked, role during the war in Darfur from the 1970s to today's continuing conflict. The author examines the influence they exercised through composing and reciting poems and songs, informal speech and other symbolic acts, and analysestheir impact in the social and political domains. Challenging the pervasive portrayal of women as natural peacebuilders and their roles as passive and submissive, the author highlights how Sudan's state government co-opted al-Hakkamat Baggara women to lobby on its behalf, to rally for war and to advocate for peace. Understanding how they can contribute to the resolution and resettlement processes is vital to sustainable reconciliation and post-conflict transformation of the unstable state.
Suad M.E. Musa (PhD) is a Freelance Consultant on gender and women's issues. She worked with the government of Sudan and with CSOs and INGOs in the Horn of Africa and Britain. She alsoworked as Assistant Professor of Sociology at Qatar University.
Melissa Thackway
Reel Resistance - The Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno
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Weaving together critical analysis and a filmic conversation, this book journeys through the multiple layers of Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno's thematically and aesthetically challenging body of work, framed here as a form of decolonial cinematic resistance.
Co-winner African Literature Association Book of the Year - Scholarship
Both a monograph and a critical dialogue between academic Melissa Thackway, author of Africa Shoots Back, and the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno, this collaborative work takes the reader on a journey through Teno's multifaceted on-going filmic reflection on Cameroon and the wider African continent, its socio-political systems, history, memory and cultures. Presenting and contextualizing Teno's cinema, it addresses the notion of political commitment in art and of cinema as a form of resistance. It also considers Teno's filmmaking both in relation to the theoretical and aesthetic debates to have animated West and Central African filmmakers since the 1960s and 1970s, and n relation to documentary filmmaking practices on the continent and beyond. In so doing, the book offers an analysis of the predominant stylistic and thematic traits of Teno's work, examines the individual films and the collective oeuvre, and highlights the evolutions of his film language and concerns. It identifies and explores the committed socio-political and historical themes at play, such as violence, power, history, memory, gender, trauma and exile. It also considers Teno's unwavering focus, both thematically and in his filmmaking choices, on forms and instances of resistance, framing his cinema as a form of decolonial aesthetics.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
In the Name of the Mother
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Alongside the impact of his early novels and plays, and his more recent memoirs, these essays give new insights into Ngugi's and other writers' responses to colonialism - there is new material here for students of literature, politics and culture.
Renowned worldwide, as novelist and dramatist, Ngugi wa Thiongo's contributions to the body of critical writing on African literature, politics and society have been highly significant. His best known critical work is Decolonising the Mind, which since publication in 1986 has profoundly influenced other writers, critics, scholars and students. These latest essays reflect Ngugi's continuing interests and enthusiasms. His choice of writers is original. He makes us look again at their novels to address his lifelong concerns with the ways to independence, the meanings of colonialism and the takeover by neo-colonialism, and the functions of literature in political as well asliterary terms. They will appeal not only to his international band of supporters. They will also introduce his views to young people discovering African and Caribbean literature.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Ngugi is renowned for his essays, including the seminal Decolonising the Mind (James Currey 1986); his plays, which led to his detentionin Kenya; his novels - the most recent works being The Wizard of the Crow (2007, translated into English from Gikuyu) and his memoirs Dreams in a Time of War and In the House of the Interpreter
East Africa [Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda]: EAEP
Christopher Gore
Electricity in Africa
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Examines the history of electricity provision in Africa and the effects of privatization and infrastructure changes in energy transformation, offering a critical window into development politics in African states.
No country has managed to develop beyond a subsistence economy without ensuring at least minimum access to electricity for the majority of its population. Yet many sub-Saharan African countries struggle to meet demand. Why is this, and what can be done to reduce energy poverty and further Africa's development? Examining the politics and processes surrounding electricity infrastructure, provision and reform, the author provides an overview of historical andcontemporary debates about access in the sub-continent, and explores the shifting role and influence of national governments and of multilateral agencies in energy reform decisions. He describes a challenging political environment for electricity supply, with African governments becoming increasingly frustrated with the rules and the processes of multilateral donors. Civil society also began to question reform choices, and governments in turn looked to new development partners, such as China, to chart a fresh path of energy transformation. Drawing on over fifteen years of research on Uganda, which has one of the lowest levels of access to electricity in Africa and has struggled to construct several, large hydroelectric dams on the Nile, Gore argues that there is a critical need to recognize how the changing political and social context in African countries, and globally, has affected the capacity tofulfil national energy goals, minimize energy poverty and transform economies.
Christopher Gore is Associate Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada.
OA EDITION This book has been made available as Open Access through the support of the Office of the Dean, Faculty of Arts, Ryerson University; Ryerson International; and the Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University.
Constance Smith
Nairobi in the Making
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Examines the making and remaking of Nairobi, one of Africa's most fragmented, vibrant cities, contributing to debates on urban anthropology, the politics of the past and postcolonial materialities.
What does it mean to make a life in an African city today? How do ordinary Africans, surrounded by collapsing urban infrastructures and amid fantastical promises of hypermodern, globalised futures, try to ensure a place for themselves in the city's future? Exploring the relationship between the remains of empire and the global city, and themes of urban belonging and exclusion, housing and security, Constance Smith examines the making and remaking of one ofAfrica's most fragmented, vibrant cities.
Nairobi is on the cusp of radical urban change. As in other capital cities across Africa, the Kenyan government has launched "Vision 2030", an urban megaproject that envisions the capital as a "world class metropolis", a spectacular new node in a network of global cities. Yet as a city born of British colonialism, Nairobians also live amongst the dilapidated vestiges of imperial urban planning; spaces designed to regulate urban subjects. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a dilapidated, colonial-era public housing project built as a model urban neighbourhood but which is now slated for demolition, Smith explores how projects of self-making and city-making are entwined. She traces how it is through residents' everyday lives - in the mundane, incremental work of home maintenance, in the accumulation of stories about the past, in ordinary people's aspirations for the future - that urban landscapes are formed, imaginatively, materially and unpredictably, across time. Nairobi emerges as a place of pathways and plans, obstructions and aspirations, residues and endurances, thatinflect the way that ordinary people produce the city, generating practices of historymaking, ideas about urban belonging and attempts to refashion "Vision 2030" into a future more meaningful and inclusive to ordinary city dwellers.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Shortlisted for the SAUK Fage & Oliver Prize 2020 'Honorable Mention' for the ALA First Book Award - Scholarship 2021
A path-breaking contribution to the critical literature on African travel writing.
Throughout the twentieth century, Nigerians have been writing about their travels within Nigeria using a variety of media and forms, from serialised newspaper travelogues to personal diaries, autobiographies and online narratives.These works offer important insights into how Nigerians have represented Nigeria to itself and to the world. This is the first book to examine the production of Nigerian travel narratives about Nigeria in the century from colonisation to independence. Rebecca Jones argues that we can read these texts both as the products of a local Nigerian print culture, and through their articulations with global travel writing traditions. Focusing on travel writing published from 1914 to 2014 in the Yoruba-speaking region of southwestern Nigeria, home to a well-established and prolific writing and print culture in both Yoruba and English, this cultural history of Nigerian travel comprisesclose readings of these works, and argues that the production of travel writing in the region can be read not simply as a foreign import, but as a cluster of genres with a cohesive local history. Writers discussed include Samuel Ajayi Crowther, I.B. Thomas, E.A. Akintan, Isaac Delano, D.O. Fagunwa, Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, Babatunde Shadeko, Damilola Ajenifuja, Chibuzor Mirian Azubuike, Pelu Awofeso, Lape Soetan, Teju Cole, Adewale Maja-Pearce, Noo Saro-Wiwa, and the Invisible Borders collective.
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An Ansoms
Field Research in Africa
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An essential exploration of and guide to research ethics in the field.
Researchers working in Africa are engaged in ethical, methodological, logistical, emotional and professional compromises. Juggling the demands of being a researcher and being human, scholars must balance the recording of data withthe emotional demands of listening, of analyzing and reporting personal, and often contradictory, narratives. This book recognizes these challenges and lays bare the underlying and important process by which the researcher grapples with emotions, and how 'feelings' inform and shape data collection, interpretation, write-up and dissemination. Based on widely researched on-the-ground work, the contributors reveal the ambiguities and inconsistences that emerge at all stages of fieldwork and how to tackle them. They examine the ethical quagmires that arise when doing research on sensitive topics in a researcher's own living environment, and suggest how to manage the complex interaction between the researcher's own identity and social relationships in the field, and navigate the role of researcher when activism risks access to the field.
Cherry Leonardi
Dealing with Government in South Sudan
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Essential reading for scholars of Sudan, of Africa and of local governance, as well as policy-makers and practitioners, this study explores chiefly authority in South Sudan from its historical origins and evolution under colonial,postcolonial and military rule, to its current roles and value in the newly independent country.
The creation of Africa's newest state, South Sudan, in 2011, involved national and international recognition of "traditional authorities", or chiefs. Chiefship has often been misunderstood to be a timeless or non-state institution, but this book argues for the mutual constitution of chiefship and the state since the mid-nineteenth century, based on research in the vicinity of three towns. The book also demonstrates that while South Sudanese towns have previously been analysed as centres of alien state power, people came to the urban "frontier" to seek the resources, regulation and justice of the state. Located conceptually - and sometimes spatially - upon this frontier, chiefshipbecame central to local relations with the state, and to state definitions of the local. The book thus addresses broader debates over the role of traditional authorities and the nature of urban-rural and state-society relations inAfrica.
Cherry Leonardi is a Senior Lecturer in African History at Durham University, a former course director of the Rift Valley Institute's Sudan course, and a member of the council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Grant Hamilton
Reading Marechera
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Variously understood as literary genius and enfant terrible of African literature, Dambudzo Marechera's work as novelist, poet, playwright and essayist is discussed here in relation to other free-thinking writers.
Considered one of Africa's most innovative and subversive writers, the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright and essayist Dambudzo Marechera is read today as a significant voice in contemporary world literature. Marechera wrote ceaselessly against the status quo, against unqualified ideas, against expectation. He was an intellectual outsider who found comfort only in the company of other free-thinking writers - Shelley, Bakhtin, Apuleius, Fanon, Dostoyevsky, Tutuola. It is this universe of literary thought that one can see written into the fiction of Marechera that this collection of essays sets out to interrogate. In this important and timely contribution to African literarystudies, Grant Hamilton has gathered together essays of world-renowned, established, and young academics from Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia in order to discuss the important literary and philosophical influences that course through Marechera's prose, poetry and drama. From classical allusion to the political philosophy of anarchism, this collection of new research on Marechera's work makes clear the extraordinary breadth and quality of thought that Marechera brought to his writing.
Grant Hamilton is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of On Representation: Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject (Rodopi, 2011), as well as a number of articles on contemporary African, postcolonial, and world literatures. He is currently working on his second book, Deleuze and African Literature.
Martin Banham
African Theatre 11: Festivals
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Contributors examine how international theatre festivals have been organised and how they have affected the evolution of sustainable theatre.
During the last fifty years, large sums of money, huge resources of labour and vast amounts of creative energy have been invested in international theatre festivals in Africa. Under banners such as 'Reclaiming the African Past' and 'African Renaissance', the festival participants have used the performing arts to address a variety of topical issues and to confront images embedded by a century of patronising colonial expositions. The themes indicate the desire to take history by the forelock, challenge perceptions and transform communities.
Volume Editor: JAMES GIBBS
Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Martin Banham
African Theatre 14: Contemporary Women
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Looks at the lives, challenges and contributions of African women from across the continent to making and participating in theatre in the 21st century.
Drawing on expertise from across the African continent this collection reflects the realities for women working and making theatre: how Egyptian director Dalia Basiouny has documented the "Tahrir Stories" of the Egyptian Revolution; how in Uganda women have used various theatrical devices, such as oral poetry, to seek common ground in a rural-urban inter-generational theatre project; and the use of physical theatre to examine disavowed memory in South Africa. The contributors also look at how practitioners are re-thinking performance space and modes of performance for gendered advocacy in Botswanan theatre, and how women are addressing gender-based violence and rape culture, comparing performance and street-based activism in South Africa and India. A particular strength of the volume is its interviews: with Jalila Baccar of Tunisia, by Marvin Carlson; six Ethiopian actresses are interviewed and introduced by Jane Plastow and Mahlet Solomon; and Ariane Zaytzeff explores "Making art to reinvent culture" with Odile Gakire Katese of Rwanda. The new play to be published is The Sentence by Sefi Atta, introduced and contextualized by Christine Matzke.
Volume Editors: JANE PLASTOW & YVETTE HUTCHISON Guest Editor: CHRISTINE MATZKE Series Editors: Martin Banham, Emeritus Professor of Drama & Theatre Studies, University of Leeds; James Gibbs, Senior Visiting Research Fellow, University of the West of England; Femi Osofisan, Professor of Drama at the University of Ibadan; Jane Plastow, Professor of African Theatre, University of Leeds; Yvette Hutchison, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre & Performance Studies, University of Warwick
Eldred Jones
ALT 11 Myth & History: African Literature Today
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The re-issue of archival volumes ALT 1 to ALT 14 makes the complete series available and provides the historical perspective of these early contributions to the literature and its criticism.
This volume, first published in 1980, provides an overview of the way myth and history have influenced both the literature of Africa and individual writers. Isidore Okpewho, Solomon O. Iyasere and Mazisi Kunene contribute here onmyth, oral tradition and African cosmological systems. Armah's vision of history is examined both in the way that it appears in his novels and in comparison with Ouologuem and Soyinka; also examined are Elechi Amadi's view of thegods, Achebe's use of myth in Arrow of God and the inward journey of Tutuola's Palm-Wine Drinkard. There are views across the Atlantic of the way the Middle Passage resonates in the work of Edouard Glissant and in the work of a number of writers from West Africa.
Professor Abdul Raufu Mustapha
Overcoming Boko Haram
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A comparative, whole-of-society approach to the Boko Haram insurgency that offers a more nuanced understanding of the risks, resilience and resolution of violent radicalization in Nigeria and beyond.
It is now more than a decade since the violent Islamic group Boko Haram launched its reign of terror across northern Nigeria, claiming more than 27,000 lives and displacing over 2 million people. While its territorial gains have largely been recaptured, the insurgency rages on, devastating communities across vast stretches of the north-east and disrupting governance, livelihoods and food security, as well as posing a security risk to Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Less attention is paid to the pervasive popular rejection of violent extremism on the ground. How did a diverse and economically dynamic West African society unravel so violently, and for so long? Why does radicalizationhave so little influence on large Muslim populations in surrounding areas, such as the Yoruba in south-western Nigeria, or the poor ethnically similar Muslim majority in central Niger just north of the border? This book looks beyond the details of the insurgency to examine the wider social and political processes that explain why Boko Haram emerged when and where it did, and what forces exist within society to contain it. Drawing on the detailed fieldworkof specialist Nigerian and Nigerianist scholars from Nigeria, connecting the worst of Boko Haram violence to the wider realities of the present, the book offers new insights into the drivers of Islamic extremism in Nigeria - poverty, regional inequality, environmental stress, migration, youth unemployment, and state corruption and human rights abuses - with a view to charting more sustainable paths out of the conflict.
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Daniel Large
Sudan Looks East
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Places Sudan's oil industry (examined here in macro, micro and political terms), its economy, external relations and changing politics under the impact of the Darfur conflict and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, in the wider context of the expansion of Asia's global economic strength.
By successfully turning to China, Malaysia and India from the mid-1990s, amidst civil war and political isolation, Khartoum's 'Look East' policy transformed Sudan's economy and foreign relations. Sudan, in turn, has been a key theatre of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian overseas energy investment. What began as economic engagements born of pragmatic necessity later became politicized within Sudan and without, resulting in global attention. Despite its importance, widespread sustained interest and continuing political controversy, there is no single volume publication examining the rise and nature of Chinese, Malaysian and Indian interests in Sudan, their economic and political consequences, and role in Sudan's foreign relations. Addressing this gap, this book provides a groundbreaking analysis of Sudan's 'Look East' policy. It offers the first substantive treatment of a subject of fundamental significancewithin Sudan that, additionally, has become a globally prominent dimension of its changing international politics.
Daniel Large is research director of the Africa Asia Centre, Royal African Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, and founding director of the Rift Valley Institute's digital Sudan Open Archive. Luke A. Patey is a Research Fellow at the Danish Institute for International Studies.
Joost Fontein
Remaking Mutirikwi
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A detailed ethnographic and historical study of the implications of fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe from the perspective of those involved in land occupations around Lake Mutirikwi, from the colonial period to the present day.
Finalist for the African Studies Association 2016 Melville J. Herskovits Award
The Mutirikwi river was dammed in the early 1960s to make Zimbabwe's second largest lake. This was a key moment in the Europeanisation of Mutirikwi's landscapes, which had begun with colonial land appropriations in the 1890s. But African landscapes were not obliterated by the dam. They remained active and affective. At independence in 1980, local clans reasserted ancestral land claims in a wave of squatting around Lake Mutirikwi. They were soon evicted as the new government asserted control over the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes. Amid fast-track land reform in the 2000s, the same people returned again to reclaim the land. Many returned to the graves and ruins of past lives forged in the very substance of the soil, and even incoming war veterans and new farmers appealed to autochthonous knowledge to make safe theirresettlements. This book explores those reoccupations and the complex contests over landscape, water and belonging they provoked. The 2000s may have heralded a long-delayed re-Africanisation of Lake Mutirikwi, but just as African presence had survived the dam, so white presence remains active and affective through Rhodesian-era discourses, place-names and the materialities of ruined farms, contour ridging and old irrigation schemes. Through lenses focused on the political materialities of water and land, this book reveals how the remaking of Mutirikwi's landscapes has always been deeply entangled with changing strategies of colonial and postcolonial statecraft. It highlights howthe traces of different pasts intertwine in contemporary politics through the active, enduring yet emergent, forms and substances of landscape.
Joost Fontein is Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Published in association with the British Institute in Eastern Africa.
Terri Ochiagha
Achebe and Friends at Umuahia
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WINNER OF THE ASAUK FAGE & OLIVER PRIZE 2016
The author meticulously contextualises the experiences of Achebe and his peers as students at Government College Umuahia and argues for a re-assessment of this influential group of Nigerian writers in relation to the literary culture fostered by the school and its tutors.
Maps the literary awakening of the young intellectuals who became known as Nigeria's "first-generation" of postcolonial writers: Chinua Achebe, Elechi Amadi, Chike Momah, Christopher Okigbo, Chukwuemeka Ike, Gabriel Okara, Ken Saro-Wiwa and I.C. Aniebo. The author provides fresh perspectives on Postcolonial and World literary processes, colonial education in British Africa, literary representations of colonialism and Chinua Achebe's seminal position in African literature. She demonstrates how each of the writers used this very particular education to shape their own visions of the world and examines the implications for African literature as a whole.
Supplementary material is available online of some of the original sources. See: http://boybrew.co/9781847011091_2
Terri Ochiagha is a Teaching Fellow in the History of Modern Africa at King's College, London and a Honorary Research Fellowat the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. She was previously a British Academy Newton Fellow at the University of Sussex.