Cultural Imagery and Racial Conflict in the United States: The Case of African-Americans

This paper utilizes recent Marxist cultural theory to theorize about the cultural dynamics of racial group conflict in the United States. After laying out a typology of cultural relations between dominant and subordinate groups, the article examines data on African-American cultural penetration of American public culture. The data indicate that since the late 1960s ‘imagerial hegemony’ has yielded to ‘imagerial projection’ for African-Americans. The article concludes by speculating about some interpretations and consequences of this phenomenon.