Page 169 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 160

Contemporary Cultural Theory

feminism against blackness might seem almost quintessentially
‘postmodern’, this is not how it appeared to her. To the contrary,
she argued that for all its talk of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’, post-
modernism displays a studied indifference to manifestations of
blackness, other than those ‘associated solely with concrete gut
level experience’. For hooks, this merely perpetuated racism by
assuming that ‘no meaningful connection’ could be made
between ‘black experience and critical thinking about aesthetics
or culture’ (hooks, 1990, p. 1). And this is so, she claims, because
postmodernism is predominantly the creation of ‘white male
intellectuals and/or academic elites’, with little relevance for
black writers in general, let alone black women. She notes wryly
that as perceptive a critic as the Australian feminist Meaghan
Morris could provide a bibliography of important contributions
to the discourse on postmodernism by women, not one of which
refers to work by black women (p. 3).

Latino studies
As with black cultural studies, the growth of Hispanic/Latino
studies has reflected the growing influence of ‘minority’ groups
on the political and cultural mainstream in the United States.
‘Hispanic’ is the term used by the Government Census Bureau,
but ‘Latino’ appears to have superseded it in popular usage. The
Spanish language and a distinctive Latin American-derived
popular music are perhaps the key elements in a cultural imag-
inary shared across the Americas. The largest minority in the
United States, Latinos actually exhibit the full range of skin
pigmentation from ‘white’ to ‘black’. They have nevertheless been
dubbed the ‘brown race’, a label perpetuated even by some Latino
activists. Darder and Torres have shown how, from the 1960s on,
‘race’ came to supplant ‘ethnicity’ when Latinos borrowed an
‘internal colony model’ from radical black scholars to theorise
their own oppression. The idea of a brown race thus provided a
‘discursively powerful category of struggle and resistance’
through which ‘to build in-group identity and cross-group
solidarity with African Americans’ (Darder & Torres, 1998, p. 9).
But as Klor de Alva observed in debate with West, racial identity

160