[T]he world-making powers of desire and pleasure, the political deployments of aesthetic sensation, the unprecedented social possibilities of fantasy, and the cultural demands made audible through melancholy and suffering have all been analyzed by cultural critics eager to trace the transformative possibilities, as well as the disciplinary dangers, of the human interior. At a moment in U.S. cultural history when politicians feel our pain, when “reality television” provides the giddy sensations absent in the mass-mediated “everyday,” when elections are decided over issues of affective union, and when “terror” animates the cultural landscape of an unevenly global security state, “interiority” is likely to remain a keyword for cultural critics well into the twenty-first century.

This is an excerpt from Christopher Castiglia’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 137).