Page 172 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 163

The cultural politics of difference

the term ‘tropicalism’, as equivalent to what Said had meant
by ‘Orientalism’, in its own attempt to come to terms with the
new post-nationalist, globalised political and cultural space. By
tropicalism they mean ‘the system of ideological fictions . . . with
which the dominant (Anglo and European) cultures trope Latin
American and U.S. Latino/a identities and cultures’ (Aparicio &
Chávez-Silverman, 1997, p. 1). There is much to be said for this
intervention at the specifically cultural level of analysis. What
worries more traditional Latino radicals, however, is the poss-
ibility that an equivalently ‘postmodern’ turn in political theory
might conceptualise ‘the ideas of capitalism, labor, and class
struggle out of existence’ (Darder & Torres, 1998, p. 5). There is
no necessary incompatibility between cultural studies and pol-
itical economy, either in general or in the specific instance of
Latino studies. How the issue will be resolved in practice remains
to be seen.
This tension between the cultural and the material is precisely
what the break from literary into cultural studies was intended
to circumvent. There is an awful poignancy, then, to Segal’s insis-
tence that feminist cultural studies now requires ‘repoliticization’,
that the rifts between economic and cultural analysis need to be
overcome once again (Segal, 1999, pp. 223–4). But so they do,
because this is where we have come to. As Nancy Fraser laments:
‘the politics of recognition is becoming increasingly dissociated
from the politics of redistribution’ (Fraser, 1997, pp. 180–1). The
promise of difference theory, that culture be understood as
radically in excess of both ‘nation’ and ‘class’, has been as polit-
ically exciting as any in recent intellectual history. Insofar as the
combination of identity politics and difference theory has
worked in and against the peculiarly ‘postmodern’ realities of
late-capitalist culture, it has sometimes attained a more fully
contemporary relevance than any other kind of theory. But insofar
as it has become one of a number of theoreticist manoeuvres by
which sections of an erstwhile progressive radical intelligentsia
have sought to theorise, and dramatise, their own emergent
depoliticisation, then it is also increasingly complicit with the
dominant politico-cultural logics of a society that is still deeply
utilitarian and capitalist in character.

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