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The cultural politics of difference

And this is what Hall’s later work comes perilously close to
celebrating: the alienated superficialities of the market. In this
respect, it represents a more general tendency for cultural studies
to transform itself into what one Brazilian writer dubs ‘commod-
ity studies’ or ‘image studies’ (Cevasco, 2000, p. 438). Gilroy sees
the problem, of course, but his solution, planetary humanism, is
in danger of raising alienated superficiality to an even higher level
of abstraction.

West and Gates
Black cultural nationalism and cultural politics have had a much
longer history in the United States than in Britain, dating arguably
from the pre-Civil War years, certainly from the Harlem Renais-
sance of the 1920s. But black cultural studies and the cultural
theory that accompanied them date only from the 1970s. The most
prominent of contemporary black cultural theorists is almost
certainly Cornel West, Professor of African-American Studies and
Philosophy of Religion at Harvard University. For West, an
adequate understanding of ‘race’ relations in America had to
begin ‘not with the problems of black people but with the flaws
of American society—flaws rooted in historic inequalities and
longstanding cultural stereotypes’ (West, 1993, p. 15). Though
disagreeing with Afrocentrism, he recognised the frustration it
expressed: ‘Afrocentrism’, he wrote, ‘is a gallant yet misguided
attempt to define an African identity in a white society perceived
to be hostile’ (p. 4). This same sense of frustration also underpins
the growing ‘nihilism’ among black populations, he argued, a
nihilism that ‘feeds on poverty’ and on the ‘shattered cultural
institutions’ that previously sustained black communities
(pp. 15–16). Such fragmentation has been driven by ‘corporate
market institutions’, the persistence of white supremacism
and an exaggerated ethic of individualism. A keen observer of
black popular culture, West noted the irony that ‘just as young
black men are murdered, maimed, and imprisoned in record
numbers, their styles have become disproportionately influential
in shaping popular culture’. He cites hip-hop as an example,
commenting that insofar as it expresses the despair of the black

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