The decade of the 1990s has seen the emergence of two important developments. These are: (1) the bourgeoisification of the world, in terms of the expansion of the capitalist market throughout the world - what comes under the general rubric of "globalization" - and (2) the breakup of various political and cultural units into their discrete constituent parts. Concurrent with these political and economic changes there have arisen in the cultural and intellectual world fields of inquiry and ways of discourse that are together a means of coming to grips with the post-Cold War world, and also effects and expressions of these world trends. [...]