In September 1995, corresponding in the hebrew calendar to the month of ELuL 5755, Jerusalem celebrated its three-thousandth anniversary, dating from King David's conquest of the Jebusite city. Of those three millennia of recorded history, the Israelites dominated the region for only six centuries; although many physical and textual reminders of ancient Jerusalem attest to its status as the center of the Hebrew political and religious imagination, the city remains the most contested site on the global map.

From the city as an eighteenth-century version of the philosophical Encyclopédie through its depiction as mystery novel, modernist collage, and complex of virtual networks, the image of the city as a book or collection of books to be read has persisted in the imaginary of modern writers. The literary works of Sébastien Mercier and Charles Nodier provide a window into the intersection of modes of literary interpretation with physical urban rebuilding that began in Paris after 1770. This evolving relation continues to play out in the Bibliothèque de France, completed in 1995, and in controversial plans to scan the world's collections of books for online access.

The sociocultural forms of accra, whose population is now an estimated 2.5 million people, grew form interactions with Europeans from the fifteenth century onward. By the end of the seventeenth century, there were three major European trading outposts on the coast—Ussher Fort (Dutch), James Fort (British), and Christiansborg Castle (Danish). Each European post imparted a particular character to its neighborhood and, more importantly, triggered specific dynamics of social struggle both between the locals and the Europeans and within each local group. Traces of the European influence can also be discerned in some of the street names—Bannerman Road, Hansen Road, Bruce Road, Lokko Road, Rev Richter Road, Joel Sonne Street—which evoke the Euro-African families that formed the earliest local elites. The postmodern maxims that reality is a product of language and that language is essentially unstable and contradictory are by now standard views in critical theory. But I sometimes wonder what conclusion the postmodernists would have come to if for their reflections they had taken not the history of Western philosophy but rather the evolution of the polyglot and hybrid forms of language, ideas, society, and culture that are abundant in the non-Western societies that make up the bulk of the world's population. Accra might have provided a rich site for such reflections.