Stuart Hall -- What is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?

"Within modern countires, there faces a batte of class and culture. Among these battles lies the struggle of cultural hegemony. It is this displacement of postmodernity -- the deep and ambiviliant fascination with difference -- that cultural hegemony is displacing. While the process of hegemony never results in absolutes, in terms of victory or defeat, it is not without sides gaining dominance. The power of relations in culture is always shifting, as if maliable; constantly seeking to define and exert itself within the cultural hierarchy. One example of this process is present within the realm of black popular culture. This, like all cultures, makes the effort to make a distinct effort deconstruct what popular is and instead focus on what the term 'popular' represents." Culture is what makes up a person. Culture is something you can not run away from because it is a universal reality. People try to claim that they can assign people culture and that just from that assignment they know everything about that person. But just like culture makes up a person, it is not all a person is. "In the paper, Hall makes the argument that, 'The struggle must be, instead, to replace the 'or' with the potentiality or the possibility of an 'and.' That is the logic of coupling rather than the logic of a binary opposition. You can be black and British... The moment the signifier 'black' is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct' (291)."

Works Cited
"Stuart Hall -- What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" Everyone Chill the Fuck Out... I GOT THIS! Web. 29 Jan. 2012. .