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      • Trusted Partner
        October 2019

        Impassive Rivers

        by Akram El Kebir

        “In any case, when you decide to try harga, it's because you no longer expect anything from life. Or that you expect a lot!” (Akram El Kebir) The summer of 2018 was particularly deadly in Oran, as the discovery of harraga corpses being fished out of the Mediterranean was commonplace. That same summer saw the commissioning of a water cab, the Rossinante II, which made the daily shuttle between Oran and the small seaside town of Aïn El Turk. A cafe owner in a small estaminet in Sidi El Houari, Zaki, at the age of 24, led a dull, boring life, with no prospects for the future other than to cherish the hope of one day attempting the harga. It was only the fear of ending up eaten by fish that dissuaded him. That said, as soon as he heard about the water cab, an absurd idea occurred to him: what if he hijacked the boat and headed for the Iberian coast? He won't be alone in this crazy adventure, as his neighborhood friends Okacha and Anis, and other outcasts, are sure to follow him. But these modern-day Don Quixotes shouldn't claim victory too soon! They'll learn the hard way that hijacking an entire ship is no picnic. They'll have to face up to the Italian crew, as well as the rest of the passengers. Passionate debates ensue, in a sort of impromptu Citizens' Assembly, where all issues affecting society are discussed. On the eve of the February 22nd Revolution, Zaki has eyes only for one of his hostages, the impetuous Nafissa...

      • Trusted Partner
        February 2021

        The Stage and the Story

        by Djawad Rostom Touati

        ‘‘So he thought of writing a play inspired by the residents' strike, which was in full swing. He was in his fifth year of medical school and his future was directly affected by the outcome of this movement, for which he was enthusiastic. However, when he wanted to take an interest in the nuts and bolts, the details he could incorporate into his art, an indefinable discomfort overcame him, and he couldn't quite grasp the cause. The project remained at half-mast in a corner of his mind, and the end of the strike finished by gathering the dust of oblivion on it.’’ Dj. R. Touati The one is multiple, and that which unites, after the moment of egregore, becomes that which divides; irreconcilably. At a time when the failure of the intuition of diversity has never been so prevalent, so widespread, it seemed salubrious to the author to show - without seeking to demonstrate - through the painting of an aesthetic reality, that if a historical moment has given rise to debate and division within the same class, then nothing is more absurd - or more specious - than the claim to unanimity within an entire people. Against the schizophrenic false identification, attempting to grasp the totality appears to be the only way to confront totalitarianism, which is, as those who denounce it pretend to ignore in order to exonerate themselves, THE PART THAT TAKES ITSELF FOR THE WHOLE. On stage, Molière, Brecht, Kateb, Alloula and others play out history... against a backdrop of burgundy-red curtains, where a dialogue of the deaf imposes blindness on the actors in action. Far from the imposing “noise” of movement, La scène et l'histoire, like a “socio-temporal” filter, sets the historical record straight: curtain up. Theater teacher Nadji, on the lookout for the old days, Rahim and Lamia, the pretenders of a politically better future, and all the others... followers of culture, that's us..., (are) beating the floor of the present.

      • Trusted Partner
        Fiction
        2022

        The End of the Desert

        by Said Khatibi

        On a nice fall day of 1988, Zakiya Zaghwani was found lying dead at the edge of the desert, giving way to a quest to discover the circumstances surrounding her death. While looking for whoever was involved in the death of the young singer, nearby residents discover bit by bit their involvement in many things other than the crime itself. ///The story takes place in a town near the desert. And as with Khatibi’s previous novels, this one is also marked by a tight plot, revolving around the murder of a singer who works in a hotel. This sets off a series of complex investigations that defy easy conclusions and invite doubt about the involvement of more than one character. /// Through the narrators of the novel, who also happen to be its protagonists, the author delves into the history of colonialism and the Algerian War of Independence and its successors, describing the circumstances of the story whose events unfold throughout the month. As such, the characters suspected of killing the singer are not only accused of a criminal offense, but are also concerned, as it appears, with the great legacy that the War of Independence left, from different aspects.///The novel looks back at a critical period in the modern history of Algeria that witnessed the largest socio-political crisis following its independence in 1988. While the story avoids the immediate circumstances of the war, it rather invokes the events leading up to it and tracks its impact on the social life, while capturing the daily life of vulnerable and marginalized groups. /// Nonetheless, those residents’ vulnerability does not necessarily mean they are innocent. As it appears, they are all involved in a crime that is laden with symbolism and hints at the status of women in a society shackled by a heavy legacy of a violent, wounded masculinity. This approach to addressing social issues reflects a longing to break loose from the stereotypical discourse that sets heroism in a pre-defined mold and reduces the truth to only one of its dimensions.

      • Trusted Partner
        October 2023

        The Nile of the Living

        by Mohamed Abdallah

        “In the old days, passing on an inheritance was rarely an issue. Oh, there were always old men to complain about the folly of the new generations and cheeky brats ready to mock their elders, but, on the whole, the world of sons resembled that of fathers, and the lessons of the latter were passed on without much difficulty. Today, each era seems to create its own world, bringing its own new life into it. The challenge is not to lose sight of the aspects of continuity that reign from one era to the next.” Mohamed Abdallah Egypt, its neighbors. Cairo, a city that has created an arena for itself between the jaws of the desert. Its river emerges from elsewhere, the Nile, always there, meandering amiably between Cairo's buildings, sometimes disappearing behind a mosque or cinema, before reappearing for good, an ancient comrade in a procession backwards through the decades. Its nourishing trickles are laden with secrets, the destinies of men and women and the mysteries of millennia. One era? No, several. At the beginning, or rather at the end, two novelists, two cousins who don't know each other but remember the same universe. In their books, they recount its beauty, greatness and pettiness, successes and failings. The root of this painful poetics? A revived horizon, refracted from one era to the next. Revolutions wished for, sung about, mourned. A world, several continents believing themselves to be in the hollow of a valley where faces emerge, voices rise, psalms are declaimed, music dances, scents run through the streets... Oumm Koulthoum, Youcef Cha-hine, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Ahmad Shawqi, Cheikh Imam, Fouad Nagm, Soad Hosny and... take their place at Café Isfet in the El Gamaliyya district. Broken, twisted, surviving, magnificent friendships. Unspoken loves, over-thought, under-experienced. Good-natured, jovial, albeit frazzled, witnesses. And, in the midst of this field of superb ruins, life, its aspirations, the arts and their.

      • Trusted Partner
        April 2023

        The Misery of Literature

        by Djawad Rostom Touati

        “His great novel, his “immense contemporary social fresco”, his “made-in-bladi human comedy” - in the words with which he dazzles his virtual contacts - was now out of the question. To those who still asked him: “What's the status of this novel?”, he invariably replied: “Perhaps under other skies. Here, all we promote is mediocrity. And everyone would nod in agreement, wishing him well.” Djawad Rostom Touati Farid, Malia, Rami, Adib and other characters wander through La civilisation de l'ersatz, the second part of the trilogy: Le culte du ça, each equipped with their own socio-cultural baggage, some motivated to change the course of their lives, sure that the sun is much warmer elsewhere; others resigned to the idea that the world is as it is: just a two-variable equation - dominated/dominant -; and still others, self-sufficient, seeking redemption in the misfortunes of others, make their way between the strata of a society in turmoil, the victim of a frozen past, a sequestered present and a future held hostage. In La civilisation de l'ersatz, both neo-prolo-aspirants-bourgeois who don't even know they're there, replace each other between the fingers of a born writer. Everything is relativity: time, space, not to mention the mind...

      • Trusted Partner
        October 2019

        The Civilization of Erzats

        by Djawad Rostom Touati

        “His great novel, his “immense contemporary social fresco”, his “made-in-bladi human comedy” - in the words with which he dazzles his virtual contacts - was now out of the question. To those who still asked him: “What's the status of this novel?”, he invariably replied: “Perhaps under other skies. Here, all we promote is mediocrity. And everyone would nod in agreement, wishing him well.” Djawad Rostom Touati Farid, Malia, Rami, Adib and other characters wander through ''The civilization of erzats'', the second part of the trilogy: ''the cult of It'', each equipped with their own socio-cultural baggage, some motivated to change the course of their lives, sure that the sun is much warmer elsewhere; others resigned to the idea that the world is as it is: just a two-variable equation - dominated/dominant -; and still others, self-sufficient, seeking redemption in the misfortunes of others, make their way between the strata of a society in turmoil, the victim of a frozen past, a sequestered present and a future held hostage. In La civilisation de l'ersatz, both neo-prolo-aspirants-bourgeois who don't even know they're there, replace each other between the fingers of a born writer. Everything is relativity: time, space, not to mention the mind...

      • Trusted Partner
        November 2022

        The Doors of the Poem

        Tribute to Habib Tengour

        by Sagawe Regina Keil, Hervé Sanson

        The twenty-seven contributions gathered here and superbly illustrated by Hamid Tibouchi - critical studies and creative texts - pay tribute to a work that is at the forefront of Algerian and, more broadly, contemporary letters, but paradoxically still little-known. On the occasion of Habib Tengour's seventy-fifth birthday, this volume is intended to open up new avenues of research into this work, and provide a more accurate understanding of the issues at stake. Tributes from his peers - poets from all over the world - give the book an affective, carnal dimension, extending the researchers' analyses with unexpected echoes. “Tengour warns us: “Only those with the right intention enter the poem! LES PORTES DU POEME thus opens on one of the most important poetic voices of his generation (Prix Dante in 2016, Prix Benjamin Fondane in 2022, Prix Dante Alighieri in 2023, for his body of work).

      • Trusted Partner
        March 2023

        “Witness to the Mutilations of the Sky”

        Fiction and testimony in the work of Mohammed Dib

        by Hervé Sanson

        From his earliest writings, Algerian writer Mohammed Dib (1920-2003) never gave in to the use of didactic, transparent language, nor to the expectations of so-called “commissioned” literature. It's the work of the language in its syntactic cutting, the weighing of the letter, that's important. In fact, the Dibian witness is masked: he conceals within himself what I'd like to call a literary witness, i.e. a textual device, plural in its declensions, which, going against the expected, allows for other times, (re)plays the texts in their unspoken, questions the memory of the texts, renews the very conception of the witness and asks the following question: what witness when fiction gets involved? This essay, covering fifty years of uninterrupted creation, sets out to delineate the various passages of witness that Dib's work encourages, but cannot avoid questioning the very nature of exegesis and the position of the exegete: do I become, at the end of this relay, the ultimate witness who wishes, from the depths of his heart, to pass the baton to a new guarantor? Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        February 2023

        Politics, performance and popular culture

        Theatre and society in nineteenth-century Britain

        by Peter Yeandle, Katherine Newey, Jeffrey Richards

        This collection brings together studies of popular performance and politics across the nineteenth century, offering a fresh perspective from an archivally grounded research base. It works with the concept that politics is performative and performance is political. The book is organised into three parts in dialogue regarding specific approaches to popular performance and politics. Part I offers a series of conceptual studies using popular culture as an analytical category for social and political history. Part II explores the ways that performance represents and constructs contemporary ideologies of race, nation and empire. Part III investigates the performance techniques of specific politicians - including Robert Peel, Keir Hardie and Henry Hyndman - and analyses the performative elements of collective movements.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        February 2019

        Contemporary Korean cinema

        Culture, identity and politics

        by Hyangjin Lee

        The first in-depth, comprehensive study of Korean cinema offering original insight into the relationships between ideology and the art of cinema from East Asian perspectives. Combines issues of contemporary Korean culture and cinematic representation of the society and people in both North and South Korea. Covers the introduction of motion pictures in 1903, Korean cinema during the Japanese colonial period (1910-45) and the development of North and South Korean cinema up to the 1990s. Introduces the works of Korea's major directors, and analyses the Korean film industry in terms of film production, distribution and reception. Based on this historical analysis, the study investigates ideological constructs in seventeen films, eight from North Korea and nine from South Korea.

      • Trusted Partner
        October 2023

        From India to Germany:What My Father's Journey Tells Usabout Migration and the Kindness ofStrangers

        by Sunita Sukhana

        — An extraordinary story of migration — Contemporary history of the 70s and backgrounds to India, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany He was the son of the Sikh priest, a successful 400-meter runner and, eventually, a migrant. In 1979, Bagicha Singh turned his back on his homeland and set off with a head full of dreams on the long, turbulent overland journey from India to Germany. It was the year the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and the Islamic Revolution raged in Iran. A year whose aftermath continues to shape the world to this day. More than 40 years later, his daughter tells the story of Bagicha's adventurous journey. The result is a touching document on origin, contemporary history, and the meaning of migration.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        Popular cinema in Brazil, 1930–2001

        by Stephanie Dennison, Lisa Shaw

        Brazil has one of the most significant and productive film industries in Latin America. This ground-breaking study provides an entertaining insight into the Brazilian films that have most captured the imagination of domestic audiences over the years. The recent international success of films such as Central Station and City of God, has stimulated widespread interest in Brazilian film, but studies written in English focus on the 'auteur' cinema of the 1960s. This book focuses on individual films in their socio-historical context, drawing on extensive fieldwork in Brazil and Latin America. It argues that Brazilian cinema has almost always been grounded in intrinsically home-grown cultural forms, dating back to the nineteenth century, such as the Brazilian music-hall, the travelling circus, radio shows, carnival, and, later, comedy television. Combining a chronological structure with groundbreaking research and a lively approach, Popular cinema in Brazil is the ideal introduction to Brazilian cinema.

      • Trusted Partner
        Medicine
        May 2025

        Brutal treatments

        Medicine and colonial violence at the end of empire

        by Russell T. Moul

        Brutal treatments explores the role medical doctors played in the colonial counterinsurgency campaigns in British Kenya (1952-1960) and French Algeria (1954-1962) in the final years of empire. It not only examines how these medical professionals became embroiled in the conflict, but also how they used their knowledge to further the interests of the state. The book makes a substantial and significant contribution to the history of medicine, the history of medical ethics, and the history of colonialism.

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        January 2024

        Capitalism in contemporary Iran

        Capital accumulation, state formation and geopolitics

        by Kayhan Valadbaygi

        By situating Iran within the neoliberal global capitalism and resulting geopolitics, this book traces the patterns of capital accumulation and transformations in class and state formation emanating from it. It shows that Iranian neoliberalisation has brought about two capital fractions, namely the internationally-oriented capital fraction and the military-bonyad complex. It substantiates that the co-existence of these competing class fractions with different accumulation strategies has generated hybrid neoliberalism. The book further demonstrates how this new class formation has reorganised the function and operation of state institutions and transformed state ideology. By documenting the ways in which Iranian neoliberalisation has reshaped the subaltern classes and formed Iran's volatile foreign policy, it also provides a novel account of major events and processes in contemporary Iran, such as the post-2017 wave of uprisings, the nuclear programme and international sanctions.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2019 - December 2024

        Concise history of China

        by Yang Ningyi,Zhao Shiyu, etc

        According to the chronological order, the book introduces the history of China from ancient times to modern society. It is rich in content, concise in writing and exquisite in pictures. It is a good book to understand the history of China.

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies

        History of Chinese Modern Popular Literature

        by Fan Boqun

        A pioneering academic project by Fan Boqun, a founder in the field of Chinese popular literature research, the book is divided into eight compilations: "Social Romance", "Martial Arts Making", "Detective Stories", "Historical Stories", "Humorous Stories", "Popular Drama", "Popular Journals" and "Chinese Modern Popular Literature Memorabilia".

      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        October 2023

        The penny politics of Victorian popular fiction

        by Rob Breton

        Penny politics offers a new way to read early Victorian popular fiction such as Jack Sheppard, Sweeney Todd, and The Mysteries of London. It locates forms of radical discourse in the popular literature that emerged simultaneously with Brittan's longest and most significant people's movement. It listens for echoes of Chartist fiction in popular fiction. The book rethinks the relationship between the popular and political, understanding that radical politics had popular appeal and that the lines separating a genuine radicalism from commercial success are complicated and never absolute. With archival work into Newgate calendars and Chartist periodicals, as well as media history and culture, it brings together histories of the popular and political so as to rewrite the radical canon.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        May 2019

        History of Textbooks in Modern and Contemporary China (I and II)

        by SHI Ou

        This Book focuses on the history of textbooks in modern and contemporary China and divides it into the Volume I and II by textbooks in modern China and contemporary China. This Book not only lists textbooks in modern and contemporary China based on historical periods, but also analyzes the various phenomena in the history of textbooks and their causes in combination with the social and historical conditions at that time. This Book is the precious historical data, and also provides useful insights into the editing and production of our textbooks today.

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