IAPL 2001 KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Friday, May 4^th, 2001

bell hooks

       BELL HOOKS, who resides in New York City, is without question the most prolific and influential Black feminist critic/theorist on the contemporary scene.  She wrote her first book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981) while she was a nineteen year old undergraduate at Stanford University.  Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, she graduated from Stanford University and completed the Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Santa Cruz where she wrote her dissertation on Toni Morrison.  hooks’ contribution to feminist theory has been significant; she helped to redefine feminism as a broad political movement to end all forms of domination.   “Feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure than women have equal rights with men,” she asserted.  “It is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels--sex, race, and class, to name a few---and a commitment to reorganizing U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”  The most visible Black woman public intellectual in the U.S. media (a mostly male group which includes Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Manning Marable, Michael Eric Dyson), Bell Hooks has published over twenty books.  They  include Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center; Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom; Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations; Reel to Real: Race, Sex and Class at the Movies; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black; Black Looks: Race and Representation; Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics; and Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with Cornel West). In addition to her political writing, she has written a number of autobiographical texts--bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Wounds of Passion: a Writing Life; and Remembered Rapture: the Writer at Work.

      An engaged teacher/scholar, she has been on the faculty at Yale University, Oberlin College, and City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and her educational theory, cultural criticism, and creative pedagogy have been the subject of a scholarly monograph, Bell Hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: a Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness (1998), and a video, Bell Hooks: Cultural Criticism and Transformation (Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA).

      hooks continues to use her writing as a weapon of resistance and has, most recently, been writing about love.  In her second monograph on the subject, Salvation: Black People and Love (2001), hooks explores how the ethic of love, which has historically been the foundation of hope and survival in African American life, is increasingly undermined. She acknowledges many influences on her life and thinking---theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and her great grand-mother Bell Hooks. Cornel West captures her importance with particular eloquence: “bell hooks’s unique contribution to intellectual life, American letters and Black thought is that of producing a challenging corpus of work which proposes a singular human struggle to be candid about one’s self and contestatory toward the dehumanizing forces in the world.  Her work sings a polyphonic ‘song of the great composite democratic individual’ yearning for a principled connectedness that promotes the distinctive self-development of each and everyone of us.  And she sings this song in the antiphonal, syncopated, and rhythmic forms bequeathed to her by her African foremothers and forefathers who refused to be silent in a strange land of pharaonic treatment.  Sing on, bell, sing on!”

      A provocative and charismatic lecturer at college campuses and community forums all across the country and around the world, bell hooks lays claim to the transformative power of critical consciousness, transgressive pedagogies,  self-actualization, and redemptive love. Her wise words, passionate politics, and healing testimonials landed her on the list of  Utne Reader’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life.”