Cape Town’s Local Modernity

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. "1 While, 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 .