If one cultural label held sway in the late twentieth century anglophone world, it was postmodernism. And if any one decade must be named as postmodernism's temporal heartland, it is arguably the 1980s. Major theoretical formulations of the term were in place by the start of the decade. The single most cited work on the subject, Fredric Jameson's essay ‘Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, also became one of the most cited works on any subject in the humanities, following its initial appearance in New Left Review in 1984. By 1990 the British theorist Kobena Mercer, in an essay subtitled ‘A Postscript to the 1980s’, could declare that the term, as the ‘prevalent name’ for the decade's ‘vertigo of displacement’, had ‘already been and gone as a best seller ideology’ (2000: 285). That was premature: Jameson's book-length Postmodernism, for instance, would not appear until the following year, and he would still be reflecting on the term two decades on. If there was any truth in this entire body of theory and analysis, as an account of an epoch, then it could not disappear as swiftly as that. Yet Mercer at least demonstrates that, among intellectuals and writers, the term had thoroughly entered regular parlance by this point; so thoroughly that it already risked expiring from its own buzzing fashionability. The term had years of life left, whether among those who had not yet heard it or those who, like Jameson, considered it not merely a glib tag but a way of naming an important truth about the present.