New Times: Making Sense of Critical/Cultural Theory in a Digital Age

The eighteen original essays in this collection, woven together, make a central claim: as a consequence of the new driving logics of globalization, transnationalism, and the digital age, all late-modern institutions and forms of association and affiliation are coalescing under the banner of new identities. These logics have unsettled the processes of the social integration of modern subjects into late-modern institutions. The modern subject is being remade and reproduced in a context in which the relations between government, society, the individual, and market forces have undergone profound transformations and reorganization. As such, critical/cultural theory is needed to address these transformations in a way that moves beyond dystopian or utopian frameworks, and instead point to the particularities that make this moment (un)livable. Hence, this book is divided into four sections in which contributors map these new, volatile developments across the domains of disciplinary history, technology, the body, and neoliberal programs of cultural and economic globalization.