BBCS resisted and rejected the homogenizing narratives about black people produced through nation-State discourse and ideologies of black nationalism; concepts including 'translation', 'cultures of hybridity', and 'new ethnicities' thus became important to the turn from racial to ethnic blackness. Thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Hazel V. Carby, Paul Gilroy, and Kobena Mercer helped influence black American scholars to challenge exclusivist cultural formations, majoritarian referential politics, and essentialized black identity, and to take up the politics of representation. Scholars who were uncomfortable with hegemonic (e.g., masculinist, cultural nationalist, American-centred) renderings of blackness or who eschewed notions of authenticity or a composite African personality readily embraced race as representation, post-structuralist discourse, and the performativity of blackness.  
Importantly, the accommodation of BBCS into black studies was accomplished with the conspicuous absence of the neo-Marxist critique that was endemic in the work of the Birmingham and London Schools. Consequently, black studies enunciated a study of culture that de-emphasized contradiction, class conflict, and power relations linked to the mode of production. The liberalism and continued retreat from radicalism that characterized the 1980s produced a much more palatable form of BBCS in American colleges and universities, which did not directly challenge the structural conditions of inequality that constituted race  
relations. Moreover, as Stuart Hall attested, American black cultural studies was subjected to: extreme professionalization and institutionalization; the formalization of questions of power, reducing them to problems of text and form; and the selective incorporation of aspects of BBCS that approached culture as a way of life without fully accommodating its interpretation of social structures.