The idea of modernity I suggest was one of the chief tropes through which Europe constructed
itself as a centre as the centre and the rest of the planet as a - its - periphery ... ... to
be marginal or peripheral is precisely not to be disconnected from a centre but to be
intimately connected in particular highly meaningful ways which are local not ' in the sense
that one sees only part of the picture but in the sense that one sees the whole picture from a
particular epistemological location that is not a centre. 1While on the one hand as an
English-speaking white woman in Cape Town my lifestyle and aspirations are comparable to my
global peers in cities such as London New York and Sydney on the other hand geopolitically
I am situated in an emerging mega-city of the South sprouting from the political history of
colonial .Africa. Living in South Africa today and watching and experiencing on a daily basis
the way South Africa is being absorbed into the African continent it is sharply obvious that a
study of early 20th Century Cape Town to have any meaning at all must reflect Cape Town
beyond the MilleM.ium. As Jerome McGann's interpretation of Frantz Fanon puts it an
imagination of the.future of what the.future .
