Endeavoring to apply a historical-materialist framework, this essay seeks to critique orthodox cultural studies by deploying certain oppositional events and discourses to point out the limitations of the hegemonic discipline. It contends that deconstructing elite bourgeois culture via institutionalizing popular tastes and demystifying idealist rhetoric has often resulted in instituting alienation with a postmodernist hubris. It suggests that engaging with the resurgence of subaltern resistance, with its focus on racial/gender negativity (as in certain democratizing initiatives in the Philippines and among ethnic artists in the United States), may catalyze a return to the original radical vision of cultural studies. Key to this renewal is the rediscovery of a dialectics of local/ethnic practice and the concrete universal of an anti-capitalist liberation project able to connect the global South and North in a symbiotic process.