December 15, 2021
bell hooks has died.
I recently received an email letter from a friend on the East Coast who commented about how busy I must be right now since “there hasn’t been anything on your blog for several days.” I wasn’t planning on posting anything today, since in fact I will be wrangling student portfolios for the remainder of the week, not to mention getting overdue books returned to the campus library. Things are getting done, however. The M.A. comprehensive exams I was assigned to evaluate have officially been taken care of. I also stepped up this past week and did the “heavy lifting” of revising a report that wasn’t actually my job to do, but got it done by the deadline and feel pleased with the results of my effort.
She was a writer I was late in discovering. I think the first time I bought one of her books (“Teaching to Transgress”) was at Groundwork Bookstore, which has operated on the campus of UCSD for close to 50 years. I don’t recollect any of my professors at UCSD ever mentioning her name in the seven years I was there, but on the other hand no one ever recommended that I read Cornell West, either. Perhaps it’s not simply a coincidence that they ended up collaborating on a book (“Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life”). Of course, lots of people didn’t make it onto the syllabi I was handed in grad school: Emily Dickinson, for example. I wasn’t assigned a single poem by her. Still, for a university to “omit” cultural workers of the stature of West and hooks is a bit puzzling, especially given her impact on the conversations regarding intersectionality. “I think of bell hooks as being pivotal to an entire generation of Black feminists who saw that for the first time they had license to call themselves Black feminists,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia, said in an interview. “She was utterly courageous in terms of putting on paper thoughts that many of us might have had in private.” (This quotation appeared in the New York Times’ obituary for bell hooks, the link to which refuses to load.)
hooks was quoted as saying that she lower-cased her pen name so that readers understand that the content of the book mattered infinitely more than her identity as an author.
In taking notice of her passing, therefore, I will conclude with a list of some of her books.
Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. 1994.
hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. (2000)
Feminism is for everybody: passionate politics. 2000.
hooks, bell. Where we stand: class matters. (2000)
hooks, bell. Salvation: Black people and love. (2001).
hooks, bell (2002). Communion: the female search for love.
Teaching community: a pedagogy of hope. New York: Routledge. 2003.
Rock my soul: Black people and self-esteem. New York: Atria Books. 2003.
The will to change: men, masculinity, and love. New York: Atria Books. 2004.
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge. 2004.
https://www.theroot.com/bell-hooks-author-educator-and-feminist-icon-dead-at-1848220902
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-12-15/bell-hooks-dead-obit
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/feminist-author-poet-bell-hooks-181057853.html
About Bill Mohr