In attempts to understand and theorize the phenomenon we call “globalization,” critical regionalism offers some of the most advanced work on the topic of place and the forms local-global interactions take in various political, economic, and cultural sites. The recent move of the American Studies Association’s official journal American Quarterly to Los Angeles from its previous institutional home in Washington, D.C., signals the organization’s attempt to reconfigure the field—by way of attention to theorizing space, place, and culture— in directions of a critical post exceptionalist American studies. Revisionist renderings of what variously is called the “glocal” or “transregional” will thus be on the horizon of American cultural studies for some time, which means that “the West”—in its multiple invocations—necessarily must be at the center of multiple field debates. This raises the most difficult and productive challenge: to critique the keyword while refusing to vacate a dialogue with it, because to concede the term would be to permit its most regressive political and social effects. The kinds of interdisciplinary conversations such a refusal requires must bring attention to the keyword as a site of global domination, but also as one that has produced a powerful countervocabulary.

This is an excerpt from Krista Comer’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 242).