ABSTRACT
According to hlanthia Dia\vara (1 998), black working-class masculinity operates in popular culture as a mobile cultural style available to different characters in fdm, be they black or white. Exploring a tradition exemplified in Blaxploitation fdms, he sholvs how a contradictory amalgam of racist stereoty~es and resistance to those stereotypes produces a form of black lvorking-class maleness coded as cool.' This becomes used across a range of sites in popular cultures, most obviously in film and music. But what is significant is how this inscription, this marking of cool attached to black bodies, becomes detachable and can operate as a mobile resource that can be 'transported through white bodies' (Dialvara 1998: 52).
