The field of cultural studies is experiencing, as Meaghan Morris puts it, an unprecedented international boom. It remains to be seen how long this boom will last and what impact it will have on intellectual life. Certainly, within the fragmented institutional configuration of the academic left, cultural studies holds special intellectual promise because it explicitly attempts to cut across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within the current scene. As Lata Mani notes in her essay in this volume, in its utopian moments cultural studies sometimes imagines “a location where the new politics of difference—racial, sexual, cultural, transnational—can combine and be articulated in all their dazzling plurality.” At the same time, it is undoubtedly cultural studies’ material and economic promise that contributes, as much as its intellectual achievement, to its current vogue. In the United States, where the boom is especially strong, many academic institutions—presses, journals, hiring committees, conferences, university curricula—have created significant investment opportunities in cultural studies, sometimes in ignorance of its history, its practitioners, its relation to traditional disciplines, and its life outside the academy.