Page 168 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 159

The cultural politics of difference

the black vernacular tradition, aiming to uncover both the key
tropes in ‘the use of black figurative language’ and the
processes by which ‘the white written text speaks with a black
voice, [which] is the initial mode of inscription of the metaphor
of the double-voiced’ (Gates, 1988, pp. 84, 131). Gates found in
the work of Ismael Reed a literary language that posited a
‘structure of feeling’ that simultaneously critiqued both ‘the
metaphysical presuppositions inherent in Western ideas and
forms of writing’ and ‘the received and conventional structures
of feeling’ inherited from the Afro-American tradition itself
(p. 250).

bell hooks
In the United States, as in Britain, black cultural criticism has
been an overwhelmingly male affair. The obvious exception
has been bell hooks, whose Ain’t I A Woman? was written against
both black male sexism and white feminist racism, as well as
addressing more general questions concerning black women’s
involvement in the women’s movement (hooks, 1981). Her work
has inspired a developing chorus of voices willing to challenge
not only racism, but also male hegemony, ‘classism’ and black
‘essentialism’ within the ‘coloured’ communities themselves
(cf. Anzaldúa, 1990; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1981; Carbey, 1987).
In Outlaw Culture, hooks critiqued both the commodification
of feminism in Madonna’s media-constructed image as ‘unre-
pressed female creativity and power’ (hooks, 1994, p. 11) and its
glamorisation by white professional feminists such as Naomi
Wolf, Camille Paglia and Catherine MacKinnon. She also insisted
that radical academics need to use a language comprehensible to
the ordinary people for whom, and presumably to whom, they
speak. Hence her own use of terms like ‘dick’ and ‘pussy’:
‘Talking sex in meta-language and theoretical prose’, she argues,
will never capture the imagination of the masses of people
‘working daily to understand how their lives have been affected
by shifting gender roles and expectations and how sexism fucks
us all up’ (p. 79).
If hooks’ invocation of blackness against feminism and

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