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People have to make do with what they have . . . there is a certain art of placing one's blows, a pleasure in getting around the rules of constraining space.
-Michel de Certeau (18)
Since the dawn of human history, social arrangements have tended to assume agonistic relations between the dominant and the subordinated. Long before terms like "culture," "folk," and "subculture" were coined, societies-guided specifically by those "on top"-were busy delineating structures of power, rule, and labor. From the ancient Egyptians to the Greeks to modern societies, one can track such cultural histories. Yet, only since the nineteenth century have scholars paid much critical attention to the ways in which culture "speaks"-that is, the ways that human social organizations define the lives and experiences of those who live them. In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold's description of culture as "the best which has been thought and said in the world" provoked a wave of early theories and critiques of culture-from Leavis's theory of mass civilization' to modern theories of marginality and mass culture. Meanwhile, Marx and Engels's critique of the ruling class spurred numerous critical responses to cultural forms of domination and oppression, such as those from the "Frankfurt scholars," critical theorists, and poststructuralists. Currently, there is an abundance of cultural theory and criticism from which to draw, spanning fields of sociology, cultural studies, rhetoric, and philosophy, to name a few.
For modern scholars, the legacy of this rather recent turn to culture is a shared interest in understanding how marginalized groups-that is, counter- and subcultures-live both in and against the dominant culture, while at the same time maintaining some type of identities for themselves. In many ways, these "subaltern" groups lead double lives. Usually they must function in some fashion within dominant culture (one has to eat and have shelter, for instance); at the same time, their struggle becomes that of resisting forces of control which threaten to silence their values, attitudes, and beliefs. Such subaltern groups traverse lines of race, religion, gender, sexual preference, and even artistic expression, often challenging or shattering those lines in the process. That there are so many such groups in existence attests to the vibrancy of their discourses.
My intention in this discussion is not...