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.