I would like to draw on Wai Chee Dimock's notion of “deep time” as “denationalized space” to situate the present study in the context of postmodernism and globalization (“Time” 760). Dimock argues that “literary space and time are conditional and elastic; their distances can vary, can lengthen or contract, depending on who is reading and what is being read” (“Planet” 174) and that “the continuum of historical life does not grant the privilege of autonomy to any spatial locale” or “to any temporal segment”: “periodization, in this sense, is no more than a fiction” (“Time” 757). Within this constellation of ideas, the “postmodern” space in the heart of Beijing stretches back to ancient China as much as it reaches forward to contemporary thought. In this sense, “postmodern” space, as a quotation (of other quoted spaces), is both postmodern and antipost-modern, postmodern in the sense that the past has collapsed into the present and antipostmodern in the sense that postmodernism is as postmodern as it is ancient, so that it loses its foothold in contemporaneity and its need for periodization. In the pages that follow, I will discuss the “postmodern” space manifested in the National Theater of China and the Palace Museum (also known as the Forbidden City) in terms of a blurred spatial dichotomy of inside and outside.

Since the year 2000 i have spent most of my summers in benghazi, libya, the city of my birth and childhood. I have been able to return for the past six years, after an absence of twenty-one. At first I anticipated disorientation. The two decades that I'd lived in the United States saw extreme forms of oppression in Libya, as well as hostility between Libya and the West, which by 2003 was coming to an end. Yet little surprised me about my city when I returned. I had expected the buildings to appear smaller than I'd remembered, the streets to seem shorter and narrower, and, given how the Qaddafi regime had mismanaged the country, everything to be shabbier.

“The French Connection”

A CHRONIC IDENTITY CRISIS AND AN OBESSIVE INTEREST IN STRONG LEGITIMATING MODELS ARE PERHAPS THE MOST CHARACTERISTC maladies of the modern Romanian cultural consciousness. Like many other peripheral nations, Romania has always been in search of strategies for being accepted as a full-fledged member of the “western European club.” Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the interminable debates concerning national identity focused repeatedly on the cultural heritage of the Roman Empire and the Romance origins of the Romanian language. Membership of the national idiom in the club of Romance languages was viewed as an irrefutable proof of a western European connection and allegiance.

When, at the beginning of the twentieth century, bucharest was called “little Paris,” the nickname implicitly measured the distance that Romania had covered on the road to modernization and westernization. The process was slow, because there were huge discrepancies between the efforts of a minority elite pushing for the entrance of the country “into Europe” and the indifference of a majority population with minimal standards of living. Despite important events favorable to the country's development—the union of the Romanian principalities (Moldavia and Walachia) in 1859 and its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878—Romania was, for most of the nineteenth century, still a province of the Ottoman Empire.

On saturdays we sometimes drive across the city to buy fish. We stand at the counter and try to choose fresh fish in a land-locked city—pink salmon, gray sole, yellow kabeljou, silver red roman. Delicious fish, at least six hours from the nearest coast. After that, we're back in the car, on the road. If we take the highway around the city, we see the mine dumps, man-made hills of gold dust, yellow in the winter sun, relics of the old gold mines on which this city was founded, heaving earth to the surface, the debris of wealth extraction. From all around, among and beyond the gold dumps, the city rises.

Twenty-five kilometers west of my Suburban Johannesburg apartment lies maropeng, the cradle of humankind World Heritage Site. Recently, twelve years since South Africa's first nonracial democratic elections, Mrs. Ples and the Taung Child, two of the paleoanthropological world's oldest skulls, were jointly exhibited. Considered to be the originators of all humanity, they are the global signifier of humanity shared. They are also foundational in forging a postapartheid united South African nationhood and in underpinning President Thabo Mbeki's continent-wide African Renaissance movement. Maropeng's proximity to Johannesburg, in its day “the model apartheid city” (Czeglédy 23), renders additionally acute past policies of racial segregation that shaped the city and, until the demise of apartheid, robbed me and my fellow citizens of the capacity to shape or interpret a shared experience of the city.

In Europe, as michel foucault aptly pointed out, western identity was constituted by the privileging of time and history (understood as alive, fluid, and ontological) over space (viewed as inert and dead); Latin America has followed a diametrically opposed process. The urban and the city in particular have dominated Latin American thought since 1492. Shaped by metropolitan centers much more than cultures in early modern Europe, the great pre-Hispanic civilizations forced the conquistadors to understand the process of conquest and evangelization in terms of urbanization. It suffices to see the map of the great city of Tenochtitlán (today's Mexico City) that accompanies Hernán Cortés's second letter to Emperor Charles V, his “Carta de relación,” and to read about the awe that overcame the historian Bernal Díaz del Castillo when he first saw the sheer vastness, beauty, and order of the great Aztec center to understand the important role urban planning would play throughout the colonial period and well beyond.

In the 1970s many persons of andean origin migrated to Lima. Informally and through the mediation of emerging grassroots organizations, the nuevos limeños negotiated with the state for their right to residency in the city and to sanitation and other services. They struggled for recognition as citizens. Gradually an informal economy mainly based on Andean cultural practices of production gave way to entrepreneurship, which created a new middle class. In this way Andean migrants to Lima became urban workers and consumers and appropriated and transformed the city.

“Reading the city” is so commonplace a metaphor that we tend not to see or hear it as such: It is an indifferent building in the lexicographical landscape, something we see and pass by every day without giving it a second look. Geographers, sociologists, and architects, as well as literary critics, all speak of—and write about, and design courses on—the “legibility” of the city, usually taking the phrase for granted, taking “reading” as read. But why should it seem so obvious to speak of reading in relation to urban experience? (Or, putting this from another direction, why does “reading the village” sound like a contradiction in terms?) And what kind of reading is being evoked when we go about “reading” the city?

The world's great cities have long been a focal point for artists, writers, poets, and social commentators, who have sought to use them both as backdrop or canvas for their work and as the subject matter of commentary and critique about the condition of society. Some have cast cities as places of nightmares and dystopian visions and landscapes. The French writer Octave Mir-beau evokes this genre when he notes that the dirt and smog of nineteenth-century London are part of “a dream, of mystery … of chaos,” what he refers to as the “special nature of the prodigious city” (qtd. in Ackroyd 773). Others, such as the Romantic poets, described the city as antinaturalistic, a place of nature's expulsion. Here urban dirt and pollution were metaphors for the degradation of human spirit and character; the English novelist George Gissing, for instance, characterized the smells in the district of Southwark in London as rising like “a miasma that caught the breath.”

Metro manila in 2006 is a labyrinthine, megalopolitan fortress of foreclosure. Almost all the main arteries of the metropolis have become virtually enclosed corridors of free-flowing vehicular traffic, without regulated crossings where pedestrians and cross-street flow might momentarily interrupt the stream of hundreds of thousands of cars, buses, and trucks careening down these roads every day. With the help of numerous “flyovers,” or overpasses, and underpasses built by the metropolitan government over the last decade and a half, these ten-lane roads have become highways that coast and tunnel through the thick of the city, connecting the scattered, archipelagic commercial centers and gated communities where the upper-class and upwardly mobile sectors work, live, shop, and socialize.

One of the first things i noticed on landing in my hometown of nairobi, kenya, for summer vacation this year was the continued proliferation of new-style music that undermines traditional ties with the solid rural identities seen previously as quintessential manifestations of patriotism and African racial pride. Radios in duty-free shops at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport were tuned to various FM stations, which issued beats that were a cross between Western hip-hop and traditional village music. Notable were the songs' calls for dissolving the boundaries between East African countries—namely, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.

BOMBARDED BY THE DISCOURSE OF “TRAGEDY” FROM MAINSTREAM MEDIA AND GOVERNMENTAL OFFICIALS TRYING TO CHARACTERIZE post-Katrina New Orleans, I decided to reread William Faulkner. Ungluing myself from the computer screen, I hoped to distract myself with a literary version of another tragedy of the South. Faulkner's sense of the city's “paradox” and “foreign”-ness—in the case of this hurricane, the fury of climatic events that inexorably led to incomprehensible effects: much of its citizenry's forced migration, dispossession of property, and denial of the right of return as well as ecological catastrophe—was geographically and culturally resonant.

It has always been difficult to talk about new orleans without resorting to cliché. Long positioned as “America's most European city” or “the city that care forgot,” the locale looms large in the national—and the literary—imagination, triggering vivid fantasies of excess and decadence but also of old–world gentility and grandeur. New Orleans, especially in its juicy Gothic flavorings, has often performed as a stand–in for the South at large, while also exhibiting a certain unique cosmopolitanism or hybridity. We might even think of it as an early manifestation of a networked global hub, the routes of the slave trade mapping our first virtual navigation system. New Orleans and indeed the entire South perform powerful ideological work for the nation, functioning throughout the twentieth century as a convenient repository and origin story for much that ails the country: poverty, racism, rigid fundamentalism, decadence, and crime.

I belong to a region of the world where there are efforts to dictate to writers their choice of language, the material they should treat, and the way in which they should approach it. Where I come from, the writer is constantly summoned, called on, to put forth edifying, uplifting opinions on everything, so as to raise the morale of the people. For example, after the victory of the Antillean athlete Marie-José Pérec at the Olympic games, when I declared to France-Antilles that I considered it an individual success and not a victory for Caribbean woman and a celebration of her power, I was vilified, dragged through the mud for months.

Only someone living in the historically burdened holy land can understand what good fortune it is to live in a city free from holy weight. I have long thought how auspicious it was for Ramallah, a city founded only in the fifteenth century, to have escaped mention in the Holy Scriptures.

AS I WALKED DOWN ULITSA RUBINSTEINA ONE MORNING, A DECREPIT DOOR OPENED, AND A PORTLY MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN STUCK HERSELF out halfway, as if unwilling to make a commitment to the outside world. She held a tray full of cigarette butts, wrappers, and other garbage. She quickly turned it upside down, dumping everything onto the sidewalk, and disappeared inside.

Sydney is probably best known nowadays for its annual gay and lesbian mardi gras parade, beamed worldwide to millions of TV and Internet viewers, marking it as one of the iconic gay cities of the contemporary world. And while Sydney also had a reputation from its earliest convict-colony days as a city with high levels of homosexual activity—one early chief justice damned it as a “Sodom” in the South Pacific (UK, Parliament, 18 Apr. 1837, 518; question 505)—only in the last two or three decades have Sydney's homosexual or gay subcultures openly flourished and, perhaps grudgingly, been accepted. Indeed, from its earliest days until some years after World War II, Australia was in the grip of Victorian moralistic attitudes, only finally broken by the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and the social movements from the 1970s.

I've just published a book about waste, so when i think about cities, i see grimy fast-food packaging in gutters, abandoned mattresses on vacant lots, and trash bins full of rotting lettuces. Shades of T. S. Eliot's Prufrock here but also a particular analytic problem: how do we make sense of the role of waste in the formation of an urban sensibility?

When I Wrote My First Novel, En Breve Cárcel, I was Determined to Erase References to Space and Have All Action (If That is the apposite word) occur in a place devoid of particular markings, as close to abstraction as I could possibly make it. This rather pretentious gesture was destined to thwart any recognition by the reader, rendering the city—or, in this case, the cities—unrecognizable and therefore a little (but not excessively) uncanny. Then, toward the end of the novel, with an equally pretentious gesture, I identified those cities and arbitrarily revealed their names. One of those cities was Paris, where I had lived for many years, the second was Buffalo, where I had lived briefly, and the third city was Buenos Aires, where I was born and spent the first thirty-odd years of my life. Looking back, I think my desire to mask all three cities may have been less frivolous than it would appear. I suspect that I didn't want to identify Paris because it was too obvious as a place of exile, especially for a Latin American. Buffalo I preferred to avoid because, although I had spent some time there, it felt very much to me like Alfred Jarry's Poland—c'est à dire nulle part. Buenos Aires, I'm guessing now, was masked for reasons more complex: mainly, I think, because the city, which for a long time had been for me a more or less familiar and stationary construct, made out of manageable and no doubt embellished memories, was becoming more and more disquieting with every trip I took there. Political repression makes short shrift of auratic illusion. It is difficult to recognize a city, or what you remember of that city, when you see soldiers with machine guns on every corner.