If the radical interventionist tradition in cultural studies scholarship is to be preserved and extended, then the "war of position" involved in getting black cultural history and theory recognized as serious fields of inquiry will have to contribute a great deal to it. This is true not just because successive generations of black intellectuals have pursued a distinct mode of cultural and political critique-urged on by the brutal absurdity of racial classification. It is also important because the situation of blacks in the West, within what I propose to call the black Atlantic world, points to some new intermediate concepts, between the local and the global, which have a wider applicability.