Research Guides: bell hooks: Biography

bell hooks (September 25, 1952 - December 15, 2021)

Hooks attended Crispus Attucks High School in Hopkinsville. After graduation she enrolled at Stanford University in Stanford, California; she obtained her B.A. degree in English in 1973. In 1976 she earned her master’s degree, also in English, from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She then began teaching English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; she remained there until 1979. In the early 1980’s she taught courses in creative writing, African American literature, and composition at several institutions, including the University of California at Santa Cruz. While teaching, Hooks also pursued her Ph.D. She received her doctoral degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1983. Teaching and earning her Ph.D., however, were not the only activities absorbing Hooks’s energy during this period. In 1981 she published her first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Continue . . .

Source: Smrcka, Traci S. “Bell Hooks.” Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition, Jan. 2003, pp. 1–2. From Literary Reference Center Plus database.

Book Collection

Feminism Is for Everybody : Passionate Politics

Resources

Big Thinker: bell hooks An outspoken professor, author, activist and cultural critic, bell hooks (1952-2021) drew attention to how feminism privileges white women’s struggles, while advocating for a more holistic way of understanding oppression.
Remembering bell hooks and 'All About Love' Author and social activist bell hooks died a couple of weeks ago, so we at Book Of The Day thought it would be nice to revisit one of our favorite interviews of hers. In 2000, she discussed her book All About Love: New Visions with NPR's Cheryl Corely. They talked about how most people misunderstand love and the many forms it can take and how transformative and powerful real love can be in all spheres of life.
With the death of bell hooks, a generation of feminists lost a foundational figure There are well-worn bell hooks books scattered throughout my library. She's in nearly every section – race, class, film, cultural studies – and, as expected, her books take up an entire shelf in the feminism section. I doubt I would have survived this long without her work, and the work of other Black feminist thinkers of her generation, to guide me. I've retrieved every bell hooks book today, and the unwieldy stack comforts me as I assess the impact of her loss.
A Conversation with Bell Hooks An interview is presented with the author, feminist and public intellectual Bell Hooks. When asked about the Hooks' putative transition of her literary subject matter from the international to the local, she cites returning to her native Kentucky to care for her elderly parents. She discusses writing her poetry book "Appalachian Elegy" and her nonfiction book "Writing Beyond Race." Hooks describes the relationship between human love and oppression as portrayed in her work.
Between Activism, Religiosity, and the Public Sphere: the Intellectual Insurgency of bell hooks In the collaborative project Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) with Cornel West, when interviewing West, bell hooks traces "the roots of (her) own critical consciousness" to her early experiences in the Black church and with religion in general, to the extent that her role as an intellectual is predicated on "spiritual practice." It is through this practice that hooks perceives her role as an intellectual as one that "links religiosity to solidarity with the poor," in a measured effort that avoids what she refers to as "the commodification of religion." To be sure, this form of commodification limits what an intellectual can and should do, when she views that role within the intersectionality of meaningful activism, critical religiosity, and the engaging of the public sphere. For hooks, an intellectual must be deeply invested in "the kind of compassion, love, and openness" necessary for inclusiveness in the face of increasingly exclusive practices of the Black community, ultimately employed in how larger society devalues and degrades Black women and Black womanhood. Because of this, hooks ascribes to an insurgent intellectualism that, while recognizing her own situatedness between activism, religiosity, and the public sphere, is contingent on a kind of process thought: her intellectual insurgency is always "becoming" and contains a phenomenological intendedness with moving beyond her ontological blackness and epistemological womanhood towards a metaphysical intellectualism and a deontology fundamentally inherent in it. She presents a Black feminist/Womanist thinking into an insurgent Heideggerian-like question of the meaning of being, as both a Black woman and a Black intellectual. To do this, her insurgency in the role of the public intellectualism is grounded on both Frederick Douglass' notion of "a heavy and cruel hand" (1853) and James Baldwin's belief that being relatively conscious means "to be in rage almost all the time" (1969).
Remembering bell hooks and her enormous legacy The influential critic, author and feminist bell hooks died Wednesday at the age of 69. She was at home, surrounded by friends and family. Amna Nawaz looks at her work and legacy.
Speaking Freely: Bell Hooks Recording from www.newseuminstitute.org
bell hooks: Cultural Criticism & Transformation bell hooks is one of America's most accessible public intellectuals. In this two-part video, extensively illustrated with many of the images under analysis, she makes a compelling argument for the transformative power of cultural criticism. In Part One, hooks discusses the theoretical foundations and positions that inform her work (such as the motives behind representations, as well as their power in social and cultural life). hooks also explains why she insists on using the phrase "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality. In Part Two, she domonstrates the value of cultural studies in concrete analysis through such subjects as the OJ Simpson case, Madonna, Spike Lee, and Gangsta rap. The aim of cultural analysis, she argues, should be the production of enlightened witnesses - audiences who engaged with the representations of cultural life knowledgeably and vigilantly. "The issue is not freeing ourselves from representations. It's really about being enlightened witnesses when we watch representations." -bell hooks