As a resident of San Francisco or New York or indeed of any center of what Achille Mbembe calls "metropolitan modernity," there is an immediate shock of recognition in reading about the elusive urbanity of Johannesburg (Nuttall and Mbembe 2004).

One of the things that strikes us on reading Michael Watts's comments on the special issue "Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis" (Public Culture 16 [fall 2003]) is not only the degree to which it is a view from the outside but also the extent to which his response displays a certain failure of the imagination.