Critical Perspectives on bell hooks

Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, George Yancy, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, George Yancy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135856885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Although bell hooks has long challenged the dominant paradigms of race, class, and gender, there has never been a comprehensive book critically reflecting upon this seminal scholar's body of work. Her written works aim to transgress and disrupt those codes that exclude others as intellectually mediocre, and hooks' challenge to various hegemonic practices has heavily influenced scholars in numerous areas of inquiry. This important resource thematically examines hooks' works across various disciplinary divides, including her critique on educational theory and practice, theorization of racial construction, dynamics of gender, and spirituality and love as correctives in postmodern life. Ultimately, this book offers a fresh perspective for scholars and students wanting to engage in the prominent work of bell hooks, and makes available to its readers the full significance of her work. Compelling and unprecedented, Critical Perspectives on bell hooks is a must-read for scholars, professors, and students interested in issues of race, class, and gender.

Introduction

MARIA DEL GUADALUPE DAVIDSON AND GEORGE YANCY

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection. (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition [New York: Continuum, 2000], p. 88)

The above epigraph speaks to bell hooks’s ethical stance, pedagogical vision, political sensibilities around the importance of transgression, philosophical anthropology informed by an antiessentialist framework, passion to help to create a world where multiple sites of oppression and dehumanization are challenged and overthrown, and belief in a collective movement toward spiritual and existential enrichment. Indeed, the above epigraph by Paulo Freire speaks to the young bell hooks within her lived context of challenging silences, of becoming within the facticity of lived social and familial spaces, and of naming as an act of empowerment.

Renaming, renarrating is not new to bell hooks or to Gloria Watkins. Part of this practice of naming is captured in a form of “back talk.”¹ Back talk “was a courageous act—an act of risk and daring.”² Yet, for hooks, it was a form of creating distance, a mode of achieving a perspective on what might otherwise remain unnamed and unspoken. At an early age, hooks knew of the importance of what Freire terms problem-posing education.³ She dared to speak and dared to speak back.

Back talk is not inherently a form of disrespect; it can function as a mode of self-assertion, a way of being agential, a way in which we are able to make ourselves known, recognized, and valued. Back talk is a mode of coming to voice, a way of “taking a stand” as when one resists. It is a species of fearless speech. Hence, for hooks, voice is a powerful vehicle in terms of which we name who and what we are. hooks writes, “Whenever I tried in childhood to compel folks around me to do things differently, to look at the world differently, using theory as intervention, as a way to challenge the status quo, I was punished.”⁴ In the very midst of her parents’ attempt to build a home where the father is symbolic of law and order, hooks was “relentlessly questioning, daring to challenge male authority, rebelling against the very patriarchal norm they [her mother and father] were trying so hard to institutionalize.”⁵ In confronting male authority, hooks was problem-posing the historical sedimentation of patriarchy. “That which had existed objectively but had not been perceived in its deeper implications (if indeed it was perceived at all) begins to ‘stand out,’ assuming the character of a problem and therefore of challenge,”⁶ according to Freire. hooks had begun to make patriarchy an object of critical reflection, and, as such, an object of her action and cognition.⁷

hooks was filled with alienation. She spoke—“back talked”—but was not heard. She writes, “I did not feel truly connected to these strange people, to these familial folks who could not only fail to grasp my worldview but who just simply did not want to hear it.”⁸ Silence and silenced, looking for a place called “home,” hooks’s daring speech-acts brought back parental efforts “to repress, contain, punish.”⁹ One can imagine the pain of being silenced.

While growing up, her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, worked in the home while her father, Veodis Watkins, worked as a custodian for the postal service. In one among many wrenching moments from her memoir, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, hooks recounts (in her voice as a child) an instance where she disrupted her brother’s game of marbles and then was beaten by her father with wood from their screen door. Her mother, although horrified by the beating of her daughter, was powerless to intervene. Later that evening, after having been sent to bed for the night without anything to eat, Gloria (hooks) overheard her father telling her mother “that the girl had too much spirit, that she had to learn to mind, that that spirit had to be broken.”¹⁰

In her foreword to Bone Black, she observes that her story “is the story of girlhood rebellion, of [her] struggle to create self and identity distinct from yet inclusive of the world around [her].”¹¹ In spite of its pain, her narrative is a beautiful one and for hooks the marvel of the text “lies in the way it all comes together exposing and revealing the inner life of a girl inventing herself—creating the foundation of self-hood and identity that will ultimately lead to the fulfillment of her true destiny—becoming a writer.”¹² Again, in Bone Black, hooks relates a number of instances in which someone or something attempts to limit her creative space, to prevent her from becoming. Indeed, there were extrafamilial forces designed to silence, to subdue the spirit. She and other black children were racialized by white society in ways that had the sole purpose of making them feel inferior, of making them internalize themselves as a problem. For example, hooks relates that she had to walk to school every day because they lived close enough to do so (noting that the bus going to their school would not pick the children up even if it was raining); furthermore, there were many other black children who had to wake up before the sun in order to attend school. Even at this young age the children knew that their treatment was skin-based. The reality of segregation in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, which was the place of her birth, reinforced a form of ontological difference, returning her black body (along with the bodies of other black children) to her (to them) as unfit, sullied.

Another example of racialization occurred with the introduction of color when hooks was a little girl in school. Children learn their colors by working with crayons.¹³ From her crayon box, she was introduced to the “flesh colored” crayon. At that point in her life, she lacked the language to articulate that the crayon box functioned as a site of racial symbolism, perhaps even as a mundane tool of oppression that reminded young nonwhite children that there is only one flesh that matters: peach-colored flesh. Although she lacked the language to give voice to her resistance at that early age, she nevertheless was able to find a creative space to resist this. She, like all children, knew that “flesh colored” crayons were the worst for creating pictures. She also knew that this so-called “flesh…[had] no relationship to our skin, for we are brown and brown and brown like all good things.”¹⁴ Through examples such as these, hooks shows that in spite of all attempts to box one in, there are moments of opposition and creative spaces to be found, if not created.

Not to question, not to interrogate, not to problem-pose, not to articulate the layers of imaginative wondering and wandering can kill the spirit. But as Freire reminds us, human existence cannot be silent. To exist is “to stand out,” is to pose one’s existence as an object of critical reflection. hooks had to risk the possibility of going mad, which she was told would happen to her if she continued “all this crazy talk.”¹⁵ As hooks writes, “Safety and sanity were to be sacrificed if I was to experience defiant speech.”¹⁶ hooks found a place to call home, so to speak, within the space of theorizing; there she could make “sense out of what was happening.”¹⁷ One might argue that there she found a place of ecstasy, a place that enabled a critical metaperspective on her situation. As Peter L. Berger notes, “In other words, ‘ecstasy’ transforms one’s awareness of society in such a way that givenness becomes possibility.”¹⁸ hooks learned “that theory could be a healing place.”¹⁹ Theory helped her to make sense of “the personal history and experiences informing [her] parents’ behavior.”²⁰ What is particularly profound is how hooks links theory with her existential sense of desperation and intensity of pain. She speaks of a radically different understanding of theory or a different calling that theory might serve. In other words, theory is not reduced to a form of objective “seeing” where one is fixed in the mode of “spectator.” Theory does not dwell in the ethereal realm of abstraction, a space where only a few “privileged” and “elite” get to ruminate within exclusive academic spaces about what “really” matters. Rather, hooks sees “the production of theory as a social practice that can be liberatory.”²¹

hooks’s deployment of theory did not simply imaginatively comport her to brave new worlds, but enabled her to act, to act bravely; her “lived experience of theorizing [was] fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery.”²² As such, there was “no gap between theory and practice.”²³ Her self-recovery—through the deployment of theory toward that end—was an act. Even as theory was a site of security, hooks continued to back talk. Not only through the deployment of theory was she problem-posing, developing a critical consciousness, but back talking/talking back also enabled a “movement from object to subject—the liberated voice.”²⁴ Through the deployment of her voice, her back talking speech-acts, hooks transgressed the role of passive observer; she was able to nurture a critical subjectivity.

Another vehicle for nurturing her sense of critical subjectivity and resistance was through the act of self-narration and self-ascription. Becoming “bell hooks” functioned as a form of rupture. The name bell hooks created a space of surrender; bell hooks was the symbolic antithesis of all that Gloria Watkins was supposed to be, “a sweet southern girl, quiet, obedient, pleasing.”²⁵ Hence, becoming bell hooks was a form of counternomination. A new narrative was needed as a way of revisioning the self, retelling the narrative possibilities of the self. hooks explains that she adopted the name bell hooks, her professional and pen name, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, who was Native American by birth. Citing her grandmother, hooks relates that she “left her native community to marry my grandfather who ‘looked like a white man but was a nigga.’”²⁶ After hearing many stories about the native traditions of her maternal great-grandmother from her maternal grandmother (Sarah Oldham), hooks was impressed by the way that her great-grandmother was able to combine “her ways of living in the world with black traditions.”²⁷ Yet, in addition to paying tribute to her ancestors, hooks’s adoption of a pen name is also a creative response to events in her personal life.

Bell Blair Hooks is described as “a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back.”²⁸ In adopting the name of her great-grandmother, hooks internalized the spirit of this woman who refused to be silent. Her renaming was itself “a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.”²⁹ As she notes, “Choosing this name as a pseudonym was a rebellious gesture.”³⁰ As a serious process, the act of naming phenomena shapes perception, and hooks came to see her sense of purpose with greater clarity through an act of reconstituted identity. “A primacy is given to naming,” according to hooks, “as a gesture that deeply shapes and influences the social construction of a self.”³¹ Adopting the name bell hooks was not a form of escapism. It was an act of resistance against stifling modes of being. One might also argue that the act of self-ascription was a form of love; not only self-love, but an act of love that reached across generations to pay homage to her great-grandmother. hooks reached back into the past and creatively aligned her identity with that of Bell Blair Hooks, which was a profoundly Womanist gesture that resulted in the creation of an ally (etymologically, “to bind to”). Incorporating that identity, reinventing that identity, “playing” with that identity, creating an ally, Gloria Watkins managed to keep alive her great-grandmother. “When the name bell hooks is called, the spirit of my great-grandmother rises.”³²

The practice of naming and claiming is not about “allowing” those voices to be heard that have been historically relegated to the margins. Naming is the active process of breaking through forms of imposed silence. Naming the world, naming reality, is a mode of problem-posing, a way of calling attention to the social world and its appearance of fixity. Naming might be understood as a form of demasking, unveiling modes of bad faith and ideological obfuscation. Naming, then, is both about renaming the self and renaming reality. Renaming the self and renaming reality are coconstitutive, a hermeneutics of transformation that presupposes and valorizes the unity between theory and practice.

hooks is critical of those discourses that reduce black women to their experiences; discourses that presume that black women are incapable of naming their own experiences. The assumption is that black women and other women of color are incapable of critically engaging their lived situations through the deployment of theory and critical discourse. On this score, black women provide experiences that are later critically interpreted by those bodies, typically white, that are said to be capable of “really” doing theory. hooks is critical of the stereotype that “the ‘real’ black woman is always the one who speaks from the gut, who righteously praises the concrete over the abstract, the material over the theoretical.³³ For hooks, pain, suffering, and joy inform her use of theory. Yet, theory is not to be reduced to the emotive, even as the desire for theory might be linked to pain and suffering. As hooks writes:

I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.³⁴

For hooks, the very way in which she wielded theory was itself an act of agency. She could have formed a private “autoerotic” relationship to theory, one where the pleasures of contemplation meant the exclusion of others, a form of practicing theory that involved a form of recoil from the quotidian, from engaging with others and passionately and critically engaging with others. However, hooks writes,³⁵ “Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask it to do so and direct our theorizing toward this end.” Hence, hooks deliberately engages theory for self-flourishing. In addition, the flourishing of others is a constitutive part of her drive to transgress those spaces, academic and otherwise, that fail to encourage self-actualization and self-flourishing for others or those spaces that actually militate against such flourishing.

hooks critiques the academy as a site where it is not important that one’s work engages in transformation of the status quo or that encourages self-actualization; it is enough that one’s work is praised by one’s colleagues, those other experts and academicians who are also endowed with exclusive epistemic access to “truly” scholarly work. hooks, however, transgresses the flat discursive practices of academia. She is “perpetually concerned with what kinds of codes, apart from interest, convey to a group of people the notion that a particular book isn’t for them.”³⁶ As such, she is concerned with the intellectual and spiritual edification of others, transgressing and disrupting those codes that exclude others as “intellectually incapable” and “m...