The foundations of global cities of the present and of cities striving to become global are firmly rooted in the colonial past—whether one considers a metropolitan center like London or cities that developed under colonialism, like Bombay, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Yet questions of foundations, roots, and the past are arguably most problematic in the formerly colonized cities. In Shanghai, for instance, the multiply colonized past has of late become a kind of virtual reality in the present remaking of the city; such redevelopment initiatives as the recent Xintiandi project, in which an entire neighborhood was emptied of its residents, restored to its colonial-era appearance, and transformed into a shopping and entertainment complex, offer the visitor nostalgic fantasies of the past as drained of critical understanding as the marshy ground beneath the project was of water. Tis perception of Shanghai and its past as a virtual reality produced out of a history of colonialism is, however, hardly new and indeed was a perception that haunted selfrepresentations of Shanghai at the height of the colonial era, during the first half of the twentieth century. As the modernist writer Mu Shiying put it in a 1933 text, Shanghai's streets were “transplanted from Europe” and “paved with shadows” (568).

This essay analyzes genre's impact on racial representation in a body of popular fiction that has shaped European Americans' definition of Asian American identity for more than three-quarters of a century: the Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. To advance his stated goal of overturning Chinese stereotypes, Biggers experimented with genres of locale and criminality. The Hawaiian setting of his first Chan story, The House without a Key, challenged the generic topography of Chinatown regionalism by invoking a counterintuitive regionalist prototype, while the book's plot followed the conventions of classical detective fiction, a highly formulaic subgenre of crime literature that perpetuated racist stereotypes while dominating best-seller lists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Exploiting a unique feature of the detective formula known as rule subversion, however, Biggers enlisted the genre's very tendencies toward racism to undermine racist stereotypes.

Writing in bed: I have always loved Edith Wharton's habit of doing just that, as well as Cynthia Ozick's discussion of it (look how neat the desk at which Wharton is photographed in her stays; imagine how much more comfortable she is in bed with her stays undone). I remember learning, during my first studies of philosophy at Bryn Mawr, that René Descartes wrote in bed, by the heat of a stove supplied by Queen Christina, to say nothing of Winston Churchill's similar custom.

The paradoxical dependence of genre histories on historically accidental acts of naming and on transcendental critical imagination is demonstrated by the Chinese western, a little-understood genre that has become a major part of Chineselanguage cinema over the past two decades. After the genre was proposed in 1984 by the Chinese film theorist Zhong Dianfei, as a realist reaction against the ideological excesses of the Cultural Revolution, its ambiguous status as a Hollywood import quickly became a proxy for larger cultural battles over China's place in an American-dominated international cultural system. Moreover, despite assurances by Zhong and other critics that the genre was not susceptible to Hollywood influence, the production history of the genre from the late 1980s to the present demonstrates a pattern of generic influence and eventual fusion that tracks Chinese state-owned studios' evolution from subsidized propaganda organs to participants in a globalized entertainment industry.

This essay explores the ruins trope in representations of the turn–of–the-millennium Latin American city. Like Sabina Berman in her dramatic evocation of Mexico City, Latin American artists represent urban ruins as volatile locales of cultural and historical presences that conflict and resist banishment. This analysis of Berman's Muerte súbita (“Sudden Death”), first staged in 1988, draws on recent theoretical inquiries that highlight the ruin's nonlinear juxtaposition of time frames and its association with the underbelly of Western modernity's rationalist narratives of progress and with a forward–looking critical consciousness. I examine the play's work with ruins and the ghostly presences they harbor to evoke contentious social, cultural, and artistic presences in a disintegrating Mexico City landscape. In stirring up the debris of vanishing urban utopias, works such as Berman's play constitute critical refusals of closure and conjure up unresolved cultural debates vying for a hearing. They also link the ruins trope to constructive, nonutopian imaginings of a less ruinous future and to creative engagements with the urban terrain, however devastated, in search of something of value.

This essay argues that epic, far from being a dead genre, ranges readily across formal and geographic boundaries and that the terms America and epic have defined each other from the Renaissance forward. Drawing on a range of case studies from Jamestown to Kentucky, I examine the ways in which epic travels through translation, exile, ethnology, and prophecy. While I focus on the United States and the colonies that would eventually constitute it, I argue that American literature was an international endeavor before it was ever a national one and that the role epic played in that internationalism prefigures and interrogates the Goethean Weltliteratur ideal dominating current discussions regarding world literature. In response to the difficulties that theory creates in discussing the development of both genre and world literature, I advocate a return to the archive to give theoretical arguments a more inductive grounding.

This review of new formalism poses challenges very different from those of the familiar compendium-review genre (e.g., “The Year's Work in Victorian Studies”). While all review essays face questions of inclusion, in an assignment of this kind, where the defining category is neither an established period nor topic but a developing theory or method emerging from the entire repertoire of literary and cultural studies, identifying the scholarly literature is a critical task in its own right. Moreover, because new formalism is better described as a movement than a theory or method, the work of selection is especially vexed and consequential. It is vexed because the practitioners' modes and degrees of identification with the movement are so various, and consequential because the reviewer's bibliographic decisions cannot help but construct the phenomenon being described.

If, as Angel Rama claims in The Lettered City, the city dictates everything one must think, forcing its inhabitants to repeat its discourse, how might shifts in the city's contours affect the construction of civil society? How might urban designs that facilitate the work of recollection help inform conceptions of citizenship for historical actors emerging from dictatorship? These are the questions cultural practitioners in Argentina address through interventions in the Buenos Aires cityscape that honor victims of state terrorism (1976–83). By analyzing three memorial sites that illuminate the complex relation between space and democratic practices, this essay traces how geography, architecture, trauma, and memory interface in the rearticulation of a collective Argentine national identity.