ABSTRACT
In spite of the disavowal of Cultural Studies' relation with theory, a disavowal that comes both from many of Cultural Studies' critics and many of its supporters, the mutual implications between theory and Cultural Studies are tenacious. Beyond the institutional boundaries of theory, area studies, and Cultural Studies, the much larger question that is lurking behind multiculturalism remains, finally, that of the relation between culture and power, between representation and social equality. Multiculturalism is the result of the putative end of metanarratives, an end that Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the 'post-modern condition'. Negotiating a point of entry into the multicultural scene means nothing less than posing the question of rights—the right to representation and the right to culture. The cultures of imperialism as much as the cultures of the West's others, the white Protestant heterosexual man of property as much as the subaltern, are considered anew as so many different kinds of 'hybrids'—as the work of Homi Bhabha, among others, suggests.
