January/February 1995
Utne Reader
bell hooks mixes Buddhism, feminism, postmodern cultural theory,
and down-home African-American common sense and eloquence into a
vision that's edgy and healing at the same time. A surgically sharp
analyst of our racial dilemmas and their sexual dimensions, she's
also a tireless celebrator of human creativity and hope who dares
to be optimistic about the future of black-white relations. Her
many books, from Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
to Outlaw Culture : Resisting Representation do cultural
theory with sass and compassion.
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Every day, the telephone answering machine in bell hooks' New
York apartment is jammed with messages--not just from her academic
colleagues and the publishers who bring out her incisive and
complex books on race, sexism, creativity, and community, but also
from her mother, brothers, and sisters, asking for her help with
church projects, planning get-togethers, gossiping.
'The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from
still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily,' says this
practicing Buddhist intellectual, whose writings employ the vision
and vocabulary of cutting-edge 'postmodern' thought. But, of
course, hooks' postmodernism is of a special kind. In books like
Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990) and
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation (1994), she looks
at issues in postmodern style, through many lenses at once--seeing
the sexism in racism, the role of media stereotypes in both, the
intricate relationships between all three and 'the practice of
domination.' And she is as hostile as any French intellectual to
the idea that the human being can be pinned down as 'mainly' a
woman, an African-American, or anything else.