Page 167 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

underclass, its popularity among western urban youth amounts
to the ‘commodification of black rage’ (p. 88).
In an essay first published in 1990 in the journal October, West
heralded the arrival of a ‘new kind of cultural worker...assoc-
iated with a new politics of difference’. The new politics would
be distinguished by its rejection of ‘the monolithic and the homog-
enous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity’;
by its repudiation of the abstract, general and universal in favour
of the concrete, specific and particular; and by its aim ‘to histor-
icize, contextualize and pluralize’ (West, 1999a, p. 119). Here West
quite explicitly identified the movement towards difference in the
fields of race, gender and sexuality, and the ‘shattering of male,
WASP cultural homogeneity’ (p. 127), as running parallel with
and being fuelled by decolonisation and revolutionary national-
ism in the ‘Third World’. But these struggles had been at least as
much a matter of equality as of difference. Hence Klor de Alva’s
criticism that in self-identifying as racially ‘black’ or ethnically
‘African-American’, West and other black intellectuals had
actually perpetuated a racialised discourse based on skin colour.
For Klor de Alva, himself a Chicano and an anthropologist, this
merely played into the hands of racism, trapping ‘blacks’ and
‘other so-called people of color, in a social basement with no exit
ladder’. West’s response was to argue that a sense of group
identity based on skin colour is necessary for ‘protection, asso-
ciation and recognition’ (p. 501). Identifying as black had been
both positive and affirmative, he continued, arguing that it was
‘important not to conflate overcoming racial barriers with
dismantling racial language’. The latter, West concluded, ‘ignores
or minimizes the history of racism’ (p. 509).
Like West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, also worked at Harvard,
where he is Chair of the Afro-American Studies Department.
One of the leading voices in black literary and cultural studies
in the United States, his work is a mixture of cultural criticism,
literary theory and autobiographical disclosure. As with West,
much of Gates’ work has been a recovery of ‘black’ cultural
tradition and the collective African-American past from under
and inside the dominant white version of American history. In
Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, Gates investigated

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