Abstract

This essay began in 1999 as an attempt to update my perceptions and experiences as a resident alien in the USA. Written expressly for what was then The UTS Review, it was intended to follow up my earlier piece published in 1997, ‘The Cultural Studies Thing You Do: In the USA after Sokal’. Just as the challenges initiated by that ‘affair’ seem to have evaporated, or been absorbed into the apparatus of systemic reinvention in the US academy, I am reinventing my correspondence.