bell hooks, and Robin D. G. Kelley made up the leftist wing of black literary and cultural criticism.  
The emergence of cultural and literary studies was profoundly influenced by the importation of black British cultural studies (BBCS) into American higher education. Stuart Hall's lectures on popular culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983 were particularly important to the rise of black cultural studies in the United States of America. BBCS was an intellectual project that commenced in the late 1970s to investigate how issues of class, culture, false consciousness, and the state were imbricated with the realities of nation, imperialism, racism, and ethnicity. It challenged the silences around race and ethnicity in British cultural studies characteristic of the work emanating from white leftist scholars like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E.P Thompson. It sought to expose racisms that were embedded in economic practice, domestic ideologies, and cultural formations. Works like Policing the Crisis (1978), The Empire Strikes Back (1982), and There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987) shifted the focus of British cultural studies from culture and society to ethnicity and identity. These texts initiated the antiessentialist turn in British cultural studies among New Left scholars.