Bell hooks

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.

She 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’s 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.

She 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, she wants to challenge the traditional education system that she believes reinforces white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values. She 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.

Hooks gave a controversial commencement speech in 2002 at Southwestern University, then her employer. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, hooks spoke of government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who went with the flow. The speech was booed by many in the audience, though others shook hooks's hand or hugged her during commencement.[1]

In 2004 hooks joined the faculty of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence[2]. 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, she 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' 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 civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

Popular Controversy

Hooks has been a subject of ire for her leftist beliefs. She gave a commencement speech in 2002 at Southwestern University (TX), during which she suggested that the students would have been better off not having attended college, and their parents not having sent them there. She has written: "Blacks who lack a proper killing rage ... are merely victims." She also wrote an essay about a sociology professor who dreams about murdering an anonymous Caucasian on an airplane. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

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”

Select 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

External links

• University of Pennsylvania hooks' article “Postmodern Blackness”
• The ejournal website link to several critical resources for bell hooks
• Shambhala Sun link to hooks' articles published in Shambhala Sun Magazine
• Real Change News link to hooks' interview with Rosette Royale
• all about bell link to biography, interviews, articles, and book information
• Crossing Boundaries, Reaching Out: The Public Scholarship of bell hooks link to article by Alice Marwick
• University of California, Santa Barbara link to a biographical sketch of hooks
• Z Magazine - Challenging Capitalism & Patriarchy: Third World Viewpoint interviews bell hooks