Remembering the 90s (New Formations)

This issue invites ten cultural critics to explore how they might remember the 1990's. Is it possible to historicize the immediate past? Can we yet pick through the density of informational overload and discern larger patterns of significance? Is this the role of cultural criticism in addressing the contemporary? Implicit in these questions is the sense that the 1990's were partly about the changing significance not only of the category of culture, but also of memory itself. How to remember an era marked by an obsession with amnesia, attention deficit, lost and recovered memory? Essays include work on art history, avant-garde poetry, marginal sciences, the computer's transformation of intimacy and reading, the melancholia of critical theory, the fate of feminism, the rise of traumaculture, the fortunes of independant music, and the sociology of globalisation. What emerges is a complex weave of arguments and ideas that make a start at writing a cultural history of the 1990's.