Michael Denning

Globalization in cultural studies Process and epoch

Globalization has quickly become a ubiquitous term; it names a process, an epoch, a discourse, a promise, a threat, a way of looking at ‘the world’. It also names a new kind of ‘inter-discipline’, a new protocol of writing and teaching in the humanities and social science. The article charts the emergence of globalization in cultural studies: first, by sketching the lineaments of globalization discourse as it appears in three major anthologies of cultural studies of globalization; second, by arguing that the freedom from history implied by the idea of globalization always depends on a variety of implicit narratives about the past; and third, by speculating on the ways one might constitute the culture of the era of globalization.