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bell hooks

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bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952) is an internationally recognized African American intellectual and social activist. Hooks focuses on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films, and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a black female perspective, hooks addresses race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

Early life

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She grew up in a working class family with five sisters and one brother. hooks' father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian, and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker.

hooks was raised in an abusive family in an all black community. She writes that the experience of growing up poor, black, and female had a profound effect on her that continues to inform her writing and activism.

hooks' early education took place in segregated public schools, and she writes of great difficulty making the transition to an integrated school, where the teachers and students were predominantly white.

hooks graduated from Crispus Attucks High School in Hopkinsville. She received her B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973 and her M.A. in the same subject from the University of Wisconsin in 1976. In 1983, after several years teaching and writing, hooks completed her doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a dissertation on African American author Toni Morrison.

Career

hooks began her teaching career in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics (Los Angeles) released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled "And There We Wept" (1978), and written under her pen name, bell hooks. The name is that of her maternal grandmother; hooks writes that it is spelled in lower-case letters to emphasize that the content of her work is more important than her name.

Hooks taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 80s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. South End Press (Boston) published her first major work, "Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism," in 1981, although it was written while she was an undergraduate student. In the decades since its publication, it has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to modern feminist thought.

Ain’t I a Woman? examines several themes that recur in hooks’ later work. Namely, the history and impact of sexism and racism on black women and the consequential devaluation of black womanhood; the role of the media, the education system, and the white supremacist patriarchal capitalist systems in the marginalization of black women; and the displacement of black women and the disregard for issues of race, class, and gender within feminism.

Since the publication of Ain’t I a Woman?, hooks has become a notable Leftist political thinker and cultural critic. Hooks tries to reach a broad audience by presenting her work in a variety of media and using writing and speaking styles that are audience-specific. As well as writing books, hooks publishes numerous articles in scholarly journals and mainstream magazines, lectures at widely accessible venues, and appears in various documentary films.

Hooks has published over thirty books, ranging in topics from black men and masculinity to self-help, engaged pedagogy to personal memoir, and sexuality to the politics of visual culture. A theme in hooks’s most recent writing is the ability of community and love to overcome race, class, and gender. In three conventional books and four children's books, she tries to demonstrate that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically)is the key to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender.

While publishing on average a book a year, hooks has continued to teach at the college and university level. She teaches because the type of writing she does, “dissident” writing, is not very profitable and cannot provide her with a sustainable income (South End Press Collective). As well, hooks wants to challenge the traditional education system that she believes reinforces white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values. Hooks has been a Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Yale University, an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and a Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York.

In 2004 hooks joined the faculty of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence[1]. Here she participates in a weekly feminist discussion group, “Monday Night Feminism,” a luncheon lecture series, “Peanut Butter and Gender” and a seminar, “Building Beloved Community: The Practice of Impartial Love.” While teaching, hooks continues to lecture at several special events and is expected to publish three books in 2006 and 2007.

Influences

Hooks' work is influenced by a variety of people, from abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (whose speech Ain't I a Woman? inspired hooks's first major work), to Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose persectives on education hooks embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy. Other notable influences on hooks are theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, writer James Baldwin, Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, and leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Controversies and criticisms

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General views

David Horowitz, in his book, The Professors, wrote of hooks, "This is a distinguished professor with a six-figure salary, loaded with academic honors, who is given license to conduct a one-sided Marxist-feminist indoctrination of hapless students, but still believes—as she explains as an invited commencement speaker—that she is living under the tyranny of a fascist dictatorship: namely, the United States.” [2]

A Killing Rage

Calling hooks "one of the most anti-male and anti-American feminists of our time", Accuracy in Academia, released an article [3] criticising hooks,

...the author of "A Killing Rage," in which she advocates the completely opposite point of view by writing about her deep desire to kill a white man simply because he had purchased a first-class plane ticket. She then elaborated on this hateful desire by writing about the necessity for blacks to unleash their "killing rage" towards whites. Not doing so, she suggests, would be doing blacks everywhere a grave injustice.

In "A Killing Rage", hooks writes, "Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims." David Horowitz claims to summarize hooks' philosophy in dealing with the possibly of her killing the white man as being that "someone else would ultimately have to be responsible, because: 'even if she had done it, she did not do it. In fact white people did it.' " [4]

2002 commencement speech

hooks gave a commencement speech in 2002 at Southwestern University (TX), where she was then employed, which was booed by many in the audience.[5] The speech was criticized by the right wing Frontpage magazine for what the writer saw as an attack on the audience:

In her usual act of spewing curses at humankind, hooks took this particular opportunity to not only do what she does best--demonize men, capitalism and "patriarchy"—but also to castigate her own audience. In her commencement speech, she reprimanded the graduates and their parents for believing in the future.

Some time after attending the speech, an irate member of the audience wrote to the Austin Chronicle who felt

the audience was insulted and called names by the guest speaker, bell hooks. We were labeled white supremacists and more. She was anti-American. It is one thing to have open discussion about alternative views in the classroom and quite another to be a bigot. The speaker's reiterated message to the graduates was they hadn't learned anything and only had death to look forward to. Many parents booed. Most in the audience, including the graduates, would not applaud.

Lauri Apple of the Austin Chronicle, however, reported [6] that

hooks -- who last year spent several weeks as a visiting scholar in SU's feminist studies department -- never called her audience "white supremacists" or anything else derogatory, though she did criticize "every imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal nation on the planet" for teaching citizens "to care more for tomorrow than today." She also addressed those students in the audience who may have spent their college years "indulging in the basic violence of self-betrayal -- going along to get along, going along with the crowd, conforming." Perhaps she heard about SU's Kappa Alpha fraternity, suspended last year for sticking a sign reading "Old People Die!" on a car parked outside a retirement community, using racist slurs, and other behavior that didn't exactly mesh with the school's stated core values of diversity and respect.

And Reverend Alan Taylor praised the speech, claiming that it was seen as controversial by the audience because she spoke truths that others might be unwilling to voice:

She didn’t give a tepid, feel good speech so common for the occasion. Instead she dared to disturb. She acknowledged that some students indulge “in the basic violence of self-betrayal – going along to get along, going along with the crowd, conforming.” She talked about government sponsored violence, oppression, and death in which she criticized, “every imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal nation on the planet” for teaching citizens “to care more for tomorrow than today.” And she advised the crowd to treasure their relationships, to build community, and to “critically review” their college years with the hopeful intention “to realize the essential goodness of your being.” The audience booed her. Newspaper articles and letters slandered her. But she left knowing she spoke the truth as it has been revealed to her through experience and reason.

Awards and nominations

  • Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics: The American Book Awards/ Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991)
  • Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism: “One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years” by Publishers Weekly (1992)
  • bell hooks: the Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace- Reader’s Digest Fund (1994)
  • Happy to Be Nappy: NAACP Image Award nominee (2001)
  • Homemade Love: The Bank Street College Children's Book of the Year (2002)
  • Salvation: Black People and Love: Hurston Wright Legacy Award nominee (2002)
  • bell hooks: Utne Reader’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life”
  • bell hooks: The Atlantic Monthly's “One of our nation’s leading public intellectuals”

Selected bibliography

  • Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism (1981) ISBN 089608129X
  • Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) ISBN 0896086143
  • Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) ISBN 0921284098
  • Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990) ISBN 0921284349
  • Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) (with Cornel West) ISBN 0896084140
  • Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) ISBN 0896084337
  • Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery (1993) ISBN 1896357997
  • Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994)ISBN 0415908086
  • Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994) ISBN 0415908116
  • Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995) ISBN 1565842634
  • Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) ISBN 0805050272
  • Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) ISBN 0805055126
  • Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996)
  • Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997) ISBN 0805057226
  • Happy to be Nappy (1999) ISBN 0786804270
  • Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999) ISBN 0805059105
  • All About Love: New Visions(2000) ISBN 0060959479
  • Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) ISBN 0896086291
  • Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000)
  • Salvation: Black People and Love (2001) ISBN 0060959495
  • Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0060938293
  • Homemade Love (2002) ISBN 0786806435
  • Be Boy Buzz (2002) ISBN 0786808144
  • Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-esteem (2003) ISBN 074345605X
  • The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2003) ISBN 0743456076
  • Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) ISBN 0415968178
  • We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004) ISBN 0415969263
  • Skin Again (2004) ISBN 078680825X
  • Space (2004) ISBN 041596816X
  • Soul Sister: Women, Friendship, and Fulfillment (2005) ISBN 0896087352
  • Witness (2006) ISBN 089608759X

Film appearances

  • Black Is, Black Ain't (1994)
  • Give a Damn Again (1995)
  • Cultural Criticism and Transformation (1997)
  • My Feminism (1997)
  • I am a Man: Black masculinity in America (2004)
  • Voices of Power (1999)
  • Baadasssss Cinema (2002)
  • Writing About a Revolution: A talk (2004)
  • Happy to Be Nappy and other stories of me (2004)
  • Is Feminism Dead? (2004)

References

  • Florence, Namulundah. bell hooks' Engaged Pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. ISBN 0897895649
  • Leitch et al, eds. “bell hooks.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2475-2484. ISBN 0393974294
  • South End Press Collective, eds. “Critical Consciousness for Political Resistance”Talking About a Revolution.Cambridge: South End Press, 1998. 39-52. ISBN 0896085872
  • Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto, ed. Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. ISBN 0252023617
  • Wallace, Michelle. Black Popular Culture. New York: The New Press, 1998. ISBN 1565844599
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