ABSTRACT
Cultural studies in the U.S.A. is being reconfigured. Explicitly interdisciplinary as a field, its institutionalization, we are promised, will bring respite to those weary from disciplinarily inflected ideological skirmishes. It will offer hospitality, if not centrality, to practitioners of postmodern, postcolonial, transnational historiography and ethnography, and provide a location where the new politics of difference—racial, sexual, cultural, transnational—can combine and be articulated in all their dazzling plurality. While I may be faulted for caricaturing the situation somewhat, there can be little question that these are indeed the ambitions of cultural studies in a postmodern and diasporic world.
