Global postmodern culture remains radically uneven, centered in Manhattan and London not Calcutta

Evidence

The only places where one can genuinely experience the postmodern ethnic cuisine are Manhattan and London, not Calcutta. And yet it is impossible to refuse “the global postmodern” entirely, insofar as it registers certain stylistic shifts in what I want to call the cultural dominant. Even if postmodernism is not a new cultural epoch, but only modernism in the streets, that, in itself, represents an important shifting of the terrain of culture toward the popular—toward popular practices, toward everyday practices, toward local narratives, toward the decentering of old hierarchies and the grand narratives. This decentering or displacement opens up new spaces of contestation and affects a momentous shift in the high culture of popular culture relations, thus presenting us with a strategic and important opportunity for intervention in the popular cultural field. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffolding project: postmodernism as cultural dominant is a definitional building block for later theories of representation and the Other in Islamophobia scholarship.
• DEFINE: Hall offers ‘the cultural dominant’ as a working definition for how to retain ‘the global postmodern’ despite its emptiness as a signifier.