ABSTRACT
This essay argues that there are three urgent challenges that must be addressed by scholars in the field of Luso-Hispanic cultural studies in order to avoid our increased marginalization and irrelevance within our institutions of higher education: 1) the rise of Asia and our growing global interconnectedness; 2) the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is to say, the fusion of the physical, biological and digital worlds; and 3) the arrival of the global pandemic in 2020. These three aspects will dramatically alter all disciplines, economies and industries around the world. This essay seeks to contend with each of these transformations while underscoring their interrelatedness. Everything – our scholarship, programs and pedagogy – must change. It is imperative that as practitioners of Cultural Studies, we cast our critical gaze onto a broader canvas, and indeed, onto our own work, in order to interrogate how cultural production has been transformed through digital culture and global cultural interpenetration. The “fierce urgency of now,” to use the words of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is that we face this new reality head-on, instead of bemoaning the loss of an idyllic past. Our ability to adapt to the present exigencies will ultimately determine our survival.
