What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture?

I 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. They have their historical specificity; and although they always exhibit similarities and continuities with other moments in which we pose a question like this, they are never same moment. And combination of what is similar and what is different defines not only specificity of moment, but specificity of question, and therefore strategies of cultural politics with which we attempt to intervene in popular culture, and form and style of cultural theory and criticizing that has to go along with such an intermatch. In his important essay, New Cultural Politics of Difference, Cornel West (1990: 19--36) offers a genealogy of what this moment is, a genealogy of 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 moment into an American context and in relation to cognitive and intellectual philosophical traditions with which it engages. According to Cornel, moment, this moment, has three general coordinates. The first is displacement of European models of high culture, of Europe as universal subject of culture, and of culture itself in its old Arnoldian reading as 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 barbarians, against people rattling gates as deathless prose of anarchy flowed away from Arnold's pen. The second coordinate is emergence of United States as a world power and, consequently, as center of global cultural production and circulation. This emergence is both a displacement and a hegemonic shift in definition of culture -- a movement from high culture to American mainstream popular culture and its mass-cultural, image-mediated, technological forms. The third coordinate is decolonization of Third World, culturally marked by emergence of decolonized sensibilities. And I read decolonization of Third World in Frantz Fanon's sense: I include in it impact of civil rights and black struggles on decolonization of minds of peoples of black diaspora. Let me add some qualifications to that general picture, qualifications that, in my view, make this present moment a very distinctive one in which to ask question about black popular culture. First, I remind you of ambiguities of that shift from Europe to America, since it includes America's ambivalent relationship to European high culture and ambiguity of America's relationship to its own internal ethnic hierarchies. Western Europe did not have, until recently, any ethnicity at all. Or didn't recognize it had any. America has always had a series of ethnicities, and consequently, construction of ethnic hierarchies has always defined its cultural politics. And, of course, silenced and unacknowledged, fact of American popular culture itself, which has always contained within it, whether silenced or not, black American popular vernacular traditions. It may be hard to remember that, when viewed from outside United States, American mainstream popular culture has always involved certain traditions that could only be attributed to black cultural vernacular traditions. The second qualification concerns nature of period of cultural globalization in progress now. I hate term the global postmodern, so empty and sliding a signifier that it can be taken to mean virtually anything you like. And, certainly, blacks are as ambiguously placed in relation to postmodernism as they were in relation to high modernism: even when denuded of its wide-European, disenchanted Marxist, French intellectual provenance and scaled down to a more modest descriptive status, postmodernism remains extremely unevenly developed as a phenomenon in which old center/peripheries of high modernity consistently reappear. …