Rap superstar Eminem has become the new poster child for everything that's dangerous about contemporary popular culture. He's crude, juvenile, and foul-mouthed. His lyrics are violent, misogynistic, and homophobic. He's corrupting our youth, poisoning our culture, and laughing about it all the way to the bank. Or so the story goes. This essay argues that much of what underpins the moral panic surrounding Eminem is a set of largely unspoken questions about race, identity, authenticity, and performance. In particular, this paper examines the ways that Eminem's status as a White man who has achieved both critical and commercial success within a predominantly Black cultural idiom serves to challenge dominant social constructions of race in the United States by de-and reconstructing popular understandings of both Whiteness and Blackness.End of the world: best rapper's white, best golfer's black.-comedian Chris Rock GAPS Describing the work on race and racism done at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s, Hall (1992) wrote We had to develop a methodology that taught us to attend, not only to what people said about race but … to what people could not say about race. It was the silences that

This article introduces a special issue on the topic of ‘Cultural Studies and Critical Literacies’. The collection of articles is related to the central theme of the inaugural Summer Institute of the Association for Cultural Studies: to explore the implications of studying literacy by combining perspectives from cultural studies and (critical) literacy studies. Furthermore, with this issue we want to map current trends in cultural studies by sharing and extending some of the discussions that took place at the Institute with the larger cultural studies community. In this introductory article, we will start by revisiting some of the work done at the intersection of literacy studies and cultural studies to set the scene for our collection of articles that focuses on different contemporary ‘uses’ of literacy.

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