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.