Art Redding, York University

Between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, during what historian Gary Gerstle terms the “unipolar moment” of 90s the United States found itself in the unique position of world imperial supremacy. It was the decade of Blockbuster videos, of email, Napster, Nintendo, Y2K, hip-hop, and the rise of gaming. Along with the cementing of digital culture in daily life, rollbacks of the gains of the Civil Rights movement and women’s liberation (rollbacks which proceed apace today), the emergence of globalization technologies (string theory, the worldwide web, the Human Genome Project), the decade was marked by the global prominence of American culture. If, as Stuart Hall asserted, postmodernism was “how the world dreams it is American,” this talk considers the relations between that globalizing political power bloc deemed the “neoliberal order” during the “long 1990s” and the culture wars of the decade, with an eye to literary production and the emergence of world literature in particular.

Art Redding is Professor of English at York University in Toronto. He has published monographs and essays on such topics as contemporary Gothic fiction, the Cold War, and American radicalism and anarchist thought. His most recent book is Pulp Virilities and Postwar American Culture and he is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Cold War.