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bell hooks (Gloria Watkins) is a cultural critic, feminist theorist, and writer. Celebrated as one of our nation's leading public intellectual by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader's 100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life, she is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world. Previously a professor in the English departments at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks is now a Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of more than seventeen books, including All About Love: New Visions; Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics; and Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. She lives in New York City.
Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice
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Paperback: 208 pages
Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (October 21, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0415539153
ISBN-13: 978-0415539159
What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural
and racial divides? By "writing beyond race," noted cultural
critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars,
activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of
domination.
In the spirit of previous classics like Outlaw Culture and Reel
to Real, this new collection of compelling essays interrogates
contemporary cultural notions of race, gender, and class. From
the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X
and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the
way race is being talked about in this "post-racial" era.
All About Love: New Visions
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Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (January 9, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0060959479
ISBN-13: 978-0060959470
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
"The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet...we would all love to
better if we used it as a verb," writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and
on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provacative and intensely personel,
the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as
romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a
society bereft with lovelessness.
As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explode th question
"What is love?" her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen
concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and
society's failure to provide a model for learning to love. Razing the cultural
paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new
path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for the individuals and for
a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the "100 Visionaries Who
Can Change Your Life." All About Love is a powerful affirmation of just how
profoundly she can.
We Real Cool: Black Men
and Masculinity
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ISBN: 0415969263
Format: Hardcover, 184pp
Pub. Date: December 2003
Publisher: Routledge
Black men are cool. But most books about black men miss the mark, making the same points-difficult childhood, white racism, poverty-they describe without meaningful explanation. bell hooks' brilliant new book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity goes where everyone else has been unwilling to go. Without casting blame, hooks tells hard truths: black men are feared, admired, made the objects of sexual fantasy, envied, but rarely loved. Black men are hated, and hooks tells us why. In these critical essays, hooks examines what black males fear most (maternal sadism, loss, emasculation) and probes the depths of their longing for intimacy, for fathers, for meaningful relationships. Highlighting the value of a feminist approach to understanding black masculinity, hooks looks at the way patriarchal thought and action undermine black male self-esteem. With compassion and generosity, bell hooks contends that black men become loving individuals only as they accept full accountability for shaping their destiny. Taking as her starting point powerful writing on black masculinity from the sixties and seventies, bell hooks looks seriously at the problems black males face - both the ones not of their own making and the ones they create for themselves. In ten clear and provocative chapters, hooks offers a thorough examination of issues ranging from the trauma of childhood abandonment, parenting and black male violence, to work, education, sexuality, self-esteem, and spiritual recovery. We Real Cool offers a redemptive vision of black men and masculinity, one that is complex and multi-layered. This is the book that everyone seeking to understand black male identity must read.
Rock
My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem
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ISBN: 074345605X
Format: Hardcover, 240pp
Pub. Date: December 2002
Publisher: Atria Books
Prolific cultural commentator Hooks (Communion) returns with another timely,
provocative book on a thorny issue currently being debated in the black
community. While popular books by black conservatives place the lack of
significant social progress squarely on the shoulders of African-Americans,
hooks cleverly repositions the argument, stating articulately that the symptoms
of the stagnation (e.g., violence, self-sabotage, malaise and symbolic suicide)
are old challenges only intensified by ongoing government neglect, racism,
psychological trauma and patriarchy. In typical hooks fashion, she employs
diverse sources to provide support for her penetrating, frank views on the
troubles that often block blacks from achieving healthy self-esteem. While she
admits the power of white racism has lessened, she believes the transition from
rigid segregation toward full integration has resulted in crippling emotional
and psychological trauma, breeding fear, paranoia, self-hatred, self-doubt and
addiction as blacks try to emulate whites and compete in the workplace.
--Publishers Weekly
Salvation:
Black People and Love
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ISBN: 1402877390
Format: Hardcover, 225pp
Pub. Date: January 2001
Publisher: Morrow,William & Co
Acclaimed visionary and intellectual, bell hooks began her exploration of the meaning of love in American culture with the bestselling All About Love: New Visions. Here she continues her love song to the nation with the groundbreaking and soul-stirring Salvation: Black People and Love. Intimate and revolutionary, Salvation is a gift as provocative as it is healing.
Written from a historical and cultural perspective, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African-Americans. Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships, and marriage in black life, the prose and poetry of Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou, the liberation movements of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, sexual pain or pleasure, hip-hop and gangsta rap culture, addiction, greed, or the failure of black leadership, hooks lets us know what love's got to do with it.
Combining the passionate politics of W E. B. DuBois with fresh, contemporary insights, hooks brilliantly offers new visions that will heal our nation's wounds from a culture of lovelessness.
Her writings on love and its inextricable links to race, class, family, history, and popular culture raise one pivotal question: How can we create beloved American communities? Salvation is bell hooks's journey to answer this question-an offering for everyone who cares about the souls of black folk.
Feminism
Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
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ISBN: 0896086283
Format: Paperback, 126pp
Pub. Date: October 2000
Publisher: South End Press
In this engaging and provocative volume, bell hooks introduces a popular theory
of feminism rooted in common sense and the wisdom of experience. Hers is a
vision of a beloved community that appeals to all those committed to equality,
mutual respect, and justice.
hooks applies her critical analysis to the most contentious and challenging
issues facing feminists today, including reproductive rights, violence, race,
class, and work.
With her customary insight and unsparing honesty, hooks calls for a feminism
free from divisive barriers but rich with rigorous debate. In language both
eye-opening and optimistic, hooks encourages us to demand alternatives to
patriarchal, racist, and homophobic culture, and to imagine a different future.
hooks speaks to all those in search of true liberation, asking readers to take a
look at feminism in a new light, to see that it touches all lives. Issuing an
invitation to participate fully in feminist movement and to benefit fully from
it, hooks shows that feminism'far from being an outdated concept or one limited
to an intellectual elite'is indeed for everybody.
Happy
to Be Nappy
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Christopher Raschka (Illustrator)
Publisher: Hyperion Books for Children
Date Published: August 1999
Format: Trade Cloth
The Publisher:
Acclaimed African-American author and poet bell hooks joins forces with illustrator Chris
Raschka to celebrate the joy and beauty of nappy hair, in this exuberant, rhythmic,
read-aloud book.
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Wounds
of Passion: A Writing Life
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September 1997
Hardcover
Review from Kirkus :
In her 15th book, hooks continues the memoir she began in Bone
Black (1996). The little southern black girl who dreamed of being a writer from the
age of ten is now a young woman entering Stanford University, away from home, from the
South and Jim Crow laws, for the first time in her life. At 19 she takes a lover, Mack, an
older black intellectual and poet, and begins work on the book that, 11 years later, would
be her first published work, Ain't I a Woman? The relationship with Mack is at the center
of this book, which is otherwise a review of all of hooks's usual concerns--race, gender,
sexuality and desire, money and its uses and abuses, aesthetics, poetry. Her affair with
Mack is turbulent, with an occasional undercurrent of violence that hearkens back to the
relationship between her mother and father delineated in the previous book. hooks eschews
conventional chronological structure to tell the story of her young adulthood and coming
of age as a writer. Instead, she repeatedly moves back and forth in time, in chapters that
are often organized thematically, shifting from third-person reflections on her young self
to first-person recollections that move uneasily between past and present tenses. The
result is an ungainly and repetitive hodgepodge of tones that's most effective when it's
most conventional. At its best, the book contains flashes of insight that serve as a vivid
reminder of how astute and downright brilliant a social critic and thinker the author is
(as in a passing observation about the corrosive effects of ``quiet drinking'' in a
family). But too much of this volume is either self-congratulatory gush (no author should
write about how ``daring and difficult'' the book at hand is), or painfully misjudged
efforts at poetic effect. Only a writer as good and determinedly idiosyncratic as hooks
could have produced a book as misguided as this.
Bone Black:
Memories of Childhood
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ISBN: 0805055126
Format: Paperback, 183pp
Pub. Date: October 1997
Publisher: Firefly Books LTD.
Review from Publisher's Weekly :
Just as hooks, author of several books on issues of race and sex (Killing Rage, etc.)
has idiosyncratically taken a lower-case name, her memoir, written in imagistic three-page
segments, takes an unconventional approach. Aiming "to conjure a rich magical world
of southern black culture," she avoids conventional signifiers like place names and
dates and even shifts between a first-person and a third-person voice, referring to
herself as "she." Add such techniques to simple, present-tense syntax, and the
results can sound precious at times. Still, hooks is right to declare that "[n]ot
enough is known about the experience of black girls in our society," so her effort
deserves close reading. She struggles with a toy Barbie, preferring a brown doll. She
finds sustenance in a rich black communitythough one grandmother hates dark skin. She
turns to religion and she loves the library. Her mother and older sister treat her
menarche with more scorn than sympathy, but she discovers on her own the private pleasure
of sexuality. There are scenes of the growing young woman learning about jazz, developing
a crush, seeing her parents fight, finding one white teacher who seems unafraid of black
kids. In the end, this book leaves us with a familiar but not unsatisfying image, that of
a sensitive youth finding in books deliverance from "the wilderness of spirit I am
living in." (Oct.) -Publisher's Weekly
Ain't I A Woman:
Black Women and Feminism
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The Publisher:
This landmark work challenges every accepted notion about the nature of black women's
lives. All progressive struggles are significant only when taking place within a feminist
movement, which states that race class & sex are immutable facts of exist
Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African-American Woman's Film
with Julie Dash, Bell Hooks, Toni C. Bambara
October 1992
Hardcover & Paperback
Dash's struggle to complete her lush, ambitious first film, Daughters of the Dust, is more than just a tale of logistics. It is a revealing study of how an African-American woman artist--the first to make a nationally distributed feature film--fought to create an honest picture of life in the Georgia Sea Islands. Included is Dash's original screenplay, an interview of the filmmaker by critic bell hooks, Dash's production notes, and color stills from the movie -The Reader's Catalog
Black Looks: Race & Representation
