This is the tale of a town on the fringes of fear, of ordinary people and everyday objects transformed by terror and madness, a microcosm of the world where nothing is ever quite what it seems. This is a world where the unreal is real, where the familiar and friendly lure and deceive. On the outskirts of civilisation sits this solitary town. Home to the unhinged. Oblivion to outsiders.Shallow Creek contains twenty-one original horror stories by a chilling cast of contemporary write...

These five plays by one of South Africa’s foremost black playwrights were written between 1979 and 1986, a period in the country’s history marked by intense repression and escalating violence. Several of Maponya's works fell foul of the censorship system. The works included in this collection - ‘The Hungry Earth’, ‘Dirty Work’, ‘Gangsters’, ‘Umongikazi/The Nurse’ and ‘Jika’ – look at topics such as the lives of miners, apartheid in hospitals, and the workings of the security apartheid stat...

In this book, South African performer and activist Robert Mshengu Kavanagh reveals the complex and conflicting interplay of class, nation and race in South African theatre under Apartheid. Evoking an era when theatre itself became a political battleground, Kavanagh displays how the struggle against Apartheid was played out on the stage as well as on the streets.Kavanagh's account spans three very different areas of South African theatre, with the author considering the merits and l...

Novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o has been a force in African literature for decades: Since the 1970s, when he gave up the English language to commit himself to writing in African languages, his foremost concern has been the critical importance of language to culture. In Something Torn and New, Ngugi explores Africa's historical, economic, and cultural fragmentation by slavery, colonialism, and globalization. Throughout this tragic history, a constant and irrepressible force was Europhon...

Half of Toronto’s population is born outside of Canada and over 140 languages are spoken on the city's streets and in its homes. How to build community amidst such diversity is one of the global challenges that Canada – and many other western nations – has to face head on.Making a Global City critically examines the themes of diversity and community in a single primary school, the Clinton Street Public School in Toronto, between 1920 and 1990. From the swift and seismic sh...

An investigation into the spatial politics of separation and division in South Africa, principally during the apartheid years, and the effects of these physical and conceptual barriers on the land. In contrast to the weight of literature focusing on post-apartheid South Africa, the focus of this book includes the spatial, political and cultural landscape practices of the apartheid government and also refers to contemporary work done in Australia, England and the US. It probes the uncertain...

Popular culture in Africa is the product of everyday life: the unofficial, the non-canonical. And it is the dynamism of this culture that makes Africa what it is. In this book, Karin Barber offers a journey through the history of music, theatre, fiction, song, dance, poetry, and film from the seventeenth century to the present day. From satires created by those living in West African coastal towns in the era of the slave trade, to the poetry and fiction of townships and mine compounds in S...

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the co...

This ground breaking new work draws together a cross-section of South African scholars to provide a lively and comprehensive review of the under-researched area of heritage practice following the introduction of the National Heritage Resources Act.Looking at the daily heritage debates, from naming streets to projects such as the Gateway to Robben Island, Desire Lines addresses the innovative strategies that have emerged in the practice of defining, identifying and developi...

Urban history is a well-established and flourishing field of historical research. Written by a leading scholar, this short introduction demonstrates how urban history draws upon a wide variety of methodologies and sources, and has been integral to the rise of interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to history since the second half of the twentieth century. Shane Ewen offers an accessible and clearly written guide to the study of urban history for the student, teacher, researcher or ge...

Mzo Sirayi has embarked on a highly impressive and daring enterprise with theunfl inching boldness of a scholar who is driven by a passionate pursuit to set therecord straight. He manages to pull no punches and make no apologies by being trueto his convictions, especially within the context of a new South Africa. The bookadopts a largely historicized, critical and analytical perspective, which strikinglyapproximates that of postcolonial theory.Owen...

The first edition of Architecture, Power, and National Identity, published in 1992, has become a classic, winning the prestigious Spiro Kostof award for the best book in architecture and urbanism. Lawrence Vale fully has fully updated the book, which focuses on the relationship between the design of national capitals across the world and the formation of national identity in modernity. Tied to this, it explains the role that architecture and planning play in the forceful assertion of state...