Global capital restructuring has led to new forms of social and spatial rearrangements. These rearrangements have seen capital accumulation underpinned by finance and the globalization of manufacturing. As a result, informal economies have emerged in the peripheral shadows of the formal, elite information-based economy. A confrontation of commodified images and commercial practices along fault lines of state and corporate power will be explored on the sidewalks at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in New York City. As a cultural crossroads in an African American commercial marketplace, this place situates many of the ironies and ambiguities that currently animate the black public sphere in the United States. We seek to illuminate a number of relationships between processes of capital restructuring, African migrations, informal economies, African American cultural forms, and those signifiers which simultaneously mask and reveal the politics appropriate to postcolonial contexts.