Page 161 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 152

Contemporary Cultural Theory

whose own difference is lived in the peripheral nation—women,
subordinate social classes, ethnic minorities, indigenous
peoples—than for the postcolonial national intelligentsia itself.
Postcolonial theory is thus repeatedly hoisted by its own post-
structuralist petard. Ahmad’s critique of Said and Rushdie clearly
implied as much. And Said himself conceded something of the
same when he wrote that: ‘The national bourgeoisies... tended
to replace the colonial force with a new class-based and ultimately
exploitative one, which replicated the old colonial structures in
new terms’ (Said, 1993, p. 269).

RACE AND ETHNICITY IN BLACK AND LATINO CULTURAL STUDIES

Race-based cultural politics are normally forged from the
common experience of racism. From indigenous movements for
the recovery of land and the protection of cultural heritage
through to the struggles of immigrant populations to overcome
racial and ethnic stigmatisation, the politics of race are played out
daily in almost every part of the world. But it is in relation to the
African diaspora that it has proven the most bitter and fractious.
As Stephen Howe puts it: ‘the central object of the obsession has
always been distinctions between black and white’ (Howe, 1998,
p. 21). It is precisely these issues and these obsessions that are
problematised in the work of black cultural theorists such as Hall
and Paul Gilroy in Britain, and Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates,
Jr, and bell hooks in the United States.

Hall and Gilroy
British cultural studies had first begun to explore the multi-
culturalism of its own society through a critique of the way
white racism constituted blackness as ‘Other’. Hall and a
number of his colleagues from the Birmingham Centre co-
authored a highly acclaimed ‘cultural studies’ account of
‘mugging’, showing how media constructions of black crimin-
ality conferred popular legitimacy on state authoritarianism
(Hall et al., 1978). This turn towards race—and ethnicity, gender

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