New Cultural Politics of Difference

Definition

The new cultural politics of difference is the political program Edward Soja derives (via Cornel West and bell hooks, and the radical women of color) for moving beyond the exhausted "equality politics" of the modernist Left. Its three converging discursive turns — cultural, postmodern, and spatial — reframe the struggle against inequality. The cultural turn shifts "from an equality politics defined primarily around socio-economic status and power to a specifically cultural politics where the aim is not just to reduce inequalities but also to redefine… how inequalities of power and status are used to foster economic exploitation, cultural domination, and individual oppression" — opening the agenda to "identity, representation, and difference" and to the "construction of the subject" (Soja 2000, p. 280). West's formulation: "Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing" (quoted p. 280).

The postmodern turn attacks "the limitations of binary thinking" not by rejecting the binaries (labor–capital, black–white, woman–man) but "re-articulat[ing] them in combinatorial and inclusionary networks" adaptive to "the precise circumstances of our present moment" (p. 280). bell hooks: "Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding… 'a space is there for critical exchange… this may very well be "the" central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur'" (quoted p. 281). The spatial turn — "the most recent addition" and "the conceptual underpinning and critical driving force behind every chapter in Postmetropolis" — mobilizes "a shared consciousness of the interrelations of space, knowledge, and power," so that "the collective struggle to take greater control over the 'making of geography' — the social production of human spatiality" becomes "an additional bonding force for combining those separate channels of resistance… that for so long have fragmented modernist equality politics" (p. 281). Difference, including the difference of intergroup inequality, is asserted as "the right to be different" — fragmentation becomes "both a danger and an opportunity" for coalition-building.

Key Thinkers

• Cornel West (referenced, not paged — see log) — "The New Cultural Politics of Difference" (1990): the trash-the-monolithic manifesto; also his 1992 verdict on the riots ("a multiracial, trans-class and largely male display of justified social rage," p. 380).
• bell hooks (referenced, not paged — see log) — Yearning (1990), Black Looks (1992): "choosing the margin as a space of radical openness"; the transformative-image program ("for those of us who dare to desire differently").
• Edward W. Soja — the three-turns synthesis (cultural, postmodern, spatial) and its linking to the spatial turn; the politics of Thirdspace.
• The radical women of color (referenced, not paged — see log) — "whose lived experience most effectively combines the oppressions of class, race, and gender"; Maria Lugones's mestiza ambiguity (quoted p. 362).
• Barbara Hooper (referenced, not paged — see log) — border work and the disordering of the order in place.
• Kimberley Crenshaw & Gary Peller (referenced, not paged — see log) — the insurrection-as-colonial-relation reading (quoted p. 374).

Related Concepts

• hybridity — the cultural formation the politics builds through.
• spatial-justice — the program's spatialized normative terminus.
• postmetropolis — the fourth discourse's political wing and the book's conclusion.
• right-to-the-city — the rights-vocabulary the politics extends ("the rights – and responsibilities – of all urban dwellers to participate effectively in the social production of their lived cityspaces," p. 258).
• corporeal-inscription — the body-politics the program runs through (Hooper's somatography; hooks's black body politics).
• otherness — the binary the politics disarticulates.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — "Moving beyond equality politics" (pp. 279–283): West's manifesto (p. 280), hooks's bonding space (p. 281), the spatial turn's movement-examples (BRU, environmental justice, intercultural coalitions), and the concluding verse's program (pp. 393–395).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• Soja notes the fourth discourse itself lacks this politics ("the relative absence of a critical cultural, postmodern, and spatial perspective has significantly weakened the… discourses on the restructuring of sociality," p. 282) — has the sociology since taken the turn, or does the empirical-descriptive mode still dominate?
• The politics of difference holds fragmentation as "both a danger and an opportunity" — what institutional forms (coalition, confederation, alliance) can hold the multiplicity without reproducing the exclusions it critiques?
• West's "creative responses to the precise circumstances of our present moment" — what are the present moment's circumstances two decades on, and does the politics need a digital-era chapter the 1990s formulation lacks?