bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952-2021) was a pioneering feminist whose writings revealed how the specific life experiences of Black women were marginalized by the idea that feminism represented all women equally. A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women's studies, she taught at the University of Southern California, Yale, Oberlin College, City College of New York, and Kentucky's Berea College, which established the bell hooks Institute for her work.
The author of more than thirty books of literary criticism, children's fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, and Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, hooks was nominated for the NAACP Image Award, won an American Book Award, and was named one of Time's 100 Women of the Year in 2020.
"Her books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives." --Cornel West "Almost everyone's assumptions about race will be challenged in this volume . . . Anyone who is not in denial about racism will be motivated to work for its demise after reading Killing Rage." --Emerge ". . . Anyone who is not in denial about racism will be motivated to work for its demise after reading Killing Rage." --Emerge "An angry book that pulls no punches . . . Her frankness and willingness to face up to the divisive issues that refuse to go away make her a voice to be reckoned with in the debate on race in America." --The New York Review of Books
"Her books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives." --Cornel West "Almost everyone's assumptions about race will be challenged in this volume . . . Anyone who is not in denial about racism will be motivated to work for its demise after reading Killing Rage." --Emerge ". . . Anyone who is not in denial about racism will be motivated to work for its demise after reading Killing Rage." --Emerge "An angry book that pulls no punches . . . Her frankness and willingness to face up to the divisive issues that refuse to go away make her a voice to be reckoned with in the debate on race in America." --The New York Review of Books
If cultural critic hooks (Black Looks), distinguished professor of English at New York's City College, doesn't have a comprehensive plan for achieving her subtitle's promise, her sensitivity to the intersection of race, class and gender infuses many of these essays, written during the past 20 years, with challenges to conventional and liberal wisdom. Deeming her own rage ``constructive,'' she urges that collective black rage be linked to a passion for justice, even as she warns that privileged blacks' ``narcissistic rage'' leads to public trivialization of poor blacks' real grievances. Though her declaration that contemporary feminism has done little to help blacks seems sweeping, hooks rightly argues that white defenders of Anita Hill have done little for poor black women, and that whites who deny that they are racist must engage in regular interaction with black folk. The author discerns that the recent wave of black self-help books ignores the link between personal and political change, and rues that contemporary black activists have forgotten the ``profound critique of capitalism'' their forebears raised in the 1960s. Also, she wisely warns against turning Afro-centrism into utopianism and wrenching multiculturalism into narrow nationalism. Author tour. (Sept.)
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