A City in Fragments

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"For years, Yair Wallach walked the streets of Jerusalem, searching for writing on its walls. He looked for graffiti, logos, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera, focusing on how modern Jerusalem took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From 1850 to 1948 Jerusalem was a city of increasingly contradictory trajectories, as Ottoman rulers, British colonial officials, Arab nationalists, Zionist activists, and Orthodox Jews negotiated its future. Text in Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages became a key means to organize space, society, and subjectivity. Wallach reassembles these written fragments to reveal how the logics of state and capital shaped the modern city"-- Provided by publisher