On Cities and Utopias, Individualities and Globality--Deadline February 1, 2010
Troy, Ur, Sumer, Babylon, Samarqand, Timbuktu, Jerusalem, Cairo, Bagdad, Damas, Constantinople/Istanbul, Prag, New York, London, Dublin, Berlin, Paris, Tangiers, Delhi/Indraprastha are just a few names in the long list of real/mythical urbanities.
The birthplaces of cultures, they symbolize better than everything else the expressions and contradictions of fictional identities. Ulysses wants to go back to Ithaca, Stephen Dedalus wants to leave Dublin, Mahfouz's "beggar" roams the streets of Cairo in search of wisdom…