ABSTRACT
A new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. The new cultural politics of difference is neither simply oppositional in contesting the mainstream (or male stream) for inclusion, nor transgressive in the avant-gardist sense of shocking conventional bourgeois audiences. The new cultural politics of difference faces three basic challenges—intellectual, existential and political. The intellectual challenge—usually cast as methodological debate in these days in which academicist forms of expression have a monopoly on intellectual life—is how to think about representational practices in terms of history, culture and society. The existential challenge to the new cultural politics of difference can be stated simply: how does one acquire the resources to survive and the cultural capital to thrive as a critic or artist? Adequate rejoinders to intellectual and existential challenges equip the practitioners of the new cultural politics of difference to meet the political ones.
