ALL What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture.pdfVIP

104 HALL What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture? Stuart Hall BEGIN WITH A QUESTION : WHAT SORT OF MOMENT IS THIS IN WHICH TO POSE THE question of black popular culture? These moments are always conjunctural. IThey have their historical specificity; and although they always exhibit similarities and continuities with the other moments in which we pose a question like this, they are never the same moment. And the combination of what is similar and what is different defines not only the specificity of the moment, but the specificity of the question, and therefore the strategies of cultural politics with which we attempt to intervene in popular culture, and the form and style of cultural theory and criticizing that has to go along with such an intermatch. In his important essay, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” Cornel West (1990: 19–36) offers a genealogy of what this moment is, a genealogy of the present that I find brilliantly concise and insightful. His genealogy follows, to some extent, positions I tried to outline in an article that has become somewhat notorious (Hall, 1988: 27– 31), but it also usefully maps the moment into an American context and in relation to the cognitive and intellectual philosophical traditions with which it engages. According to Cornel, the moment, this moment, has three general coordinates. The first is the displacement of European models of high culture, of Europe as the universal subject of culture, and of culture itself in its old Arnoldian reading as the last refuge I nearly said of scoundrels, but I won’t say who it is of. At least we know who it was against — culture against the barbarians, against the people rattling the gates as the deathless prose of anar