Born from the crisis of Eurocentric humanities and socialscience disciplines, the “desire” called Cultural Studies (CS) in the metropolitan academies has now become institutionalized and reconfigured safely. With its canonical archive (Stuart Hall, de Certeau, Lyotard, etc.) and regimes of semiotic reading, deconstructive aesthetics, and eclectic inventory, Western CS has failed to question the hegemonic relations of power between metropole and periphery, between subordinate and dominant nation-states. It has failed, more precisely, to critique the globalized commodification of cultural products (now labeled “intellectual property”) and practices. More seriously, it has failed to challenge the persistent domination of peripheral, neocolonized countries by hegemonic, advanced industrial nation-states. In my paper, 1 attempt to diagnose the causes of these failures. In general, 1 argue that it inheres in the postmodernist relativism and nominalism of CS, its rejection of the imperative to integrate theory and practice, its ethos of rhetorical mastery. These inadequacies are worsened by its pragmatic refusal to grasp the politica1 economy operating in the globalization or transnationalization of cultures around the world. Lacking a framework of rendering intelligible the effects of the transnational market on culture (ideas, practices, products exchanged via multimedia communications technology), CS has in general become complicitous with the profound dynamics of reification that has undermined the emancipatory project of modernity (already elaborated by various thinkers, among them Habermas, Jameson, Said, and others). I propose a renewal of a historicist “cultural materialism” attuned to developments in Asia (particularly China), Latin America, and Africa that would recover the impulses of “national liberation struggles” in the last half of this century. This new framework would try to recover those oppositional and critical impulses embodied in the examples of Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Sun Yat-sen, C.L.R. James, Che Guevarra, Lu Hsun, Aimé Césaire, and others. I am speculating on the possibility of a program of cultural studies keyed to the cultural practices of subaltern people of color that will articulate selected elements of the Western Enlightenment tradition with the needs and projects of hitherto silenced, marginalized, and invisible “Others.”