Continuing population shifts, the extraordinary national and international mobility underwritten by automobiles and air travel, the reconstitution of cities and suburbs, the growth of exurbia, the continuing depredation of rural areas, the omnipresence of franchises, electronic media, and wireless communication: these effects of modernization are altering not only particular places but the role of place in creating regions. Subnational regions exist alongside supranational economic and political alliances, including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, which are further cutting across nations and transforming economies and populations. These macro-forces, in turn, encourage new forms of cultural, creative, and political activity. For instance, the individual and collaborative performances of artist-activist Guillermo Gómez-Peña mix installation art, radio, poetry, journalism, performance, and video as they explode presumptions about the discreteness of the United States and of the Southwest as a region within it. As American cultural studies attends to the ongoing changes in regions and in related expressive work, it will also need to keep in sight the paradoxes that continue to constitute both.

This is an excerpt from Sandra A. Zagarell’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 201).