Cultural Studies: So Much Promise, So Little Progress

“In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we heard (and I believed) that cultural studies would fan out across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, inducing them to become at once more self-critical and more open to public engagement. … [But] over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of cultural-studies triumphalism that now seems unwarranted and embarrassing.”