Popular culture can be won position by position but never captured outright.

Evidence

By definition, black popular culture is a contradictory space. It is a sight of strategic contestation. But it can never be simplified or explained in terms of the simple binary oppositions that are still habitually used to map it out: high and low, resistance versus incorporation, authentic versus inauthentic, experiential versus formal, opposition versus homogenization. There are always positions to be won in popular culture, but no struggle can capture popular culture itself for our side or theirs. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 282

Categorization

• XREF: This is a key mechanism for the ‘resistance versus incorporation’ binary that Hall’s hegemony framework from earlier chapters presses against — connects to Gramsci and to how Islamophobia readings treat contested representation.