The author and bell-crop culture critic creates a portrait on December 16, 1996, in New York City.
Image of Karjean Levine / Getty
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The author and bell-crop culture critic creates a portrait on December 16, 1996, in New York City.
Image of Karjean Levine / Getty
Renowned and pioneering author, poet, feminist, cultural critic and professor passed away Wednesday at the age of 69. Her death was the first. announced by her niece, Ebony Motley, who said she died at home surrounded by family and friends. No cause of death has been reported, but Berea University in Kentucky, where hooks has taught since 2004, said in a Press Release that she was suffering from a long illness.
hooks, who preferred to spell her name without capitalization as a way to emphasize her personal identity, Gloria Jean Watkins was born the fourth of seven children in Hopkinsville, Ky., on the 25th. September 1952. Her pseudonym is a tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.
She attended segregated schools in her hometown of Christian County, before earning an undergraduate degree at Stanford University in California, a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, and a doctorate in literature from the University of California at Santa. Cruz.
She has taught at Stanford University, Yale University, Oberlin College in Ohio, and City College of New York before returning to Kentucky to teach at Berea College, where it is now located. Bell Hook Institute.
Author of more than thirty wide-ranging books who published her first title, a collection of poems And we passed, in 1978. Her Influential Book Am I not a woman? Black women and feminism followed in 1981. Three years later, she Feminism: From the margins to the center explores and criticizes the feminist movement’s tendency to focus and privileged the experiences of white women.
Often, hooks’ work addresses the profound intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and geographic location. She wrote about her native Appalachian, and raised there as a Black girl, in the anthology of critical essays. belong: a culture of place, and in the poetry book Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place.
In a 2000 interview with All things Considered, hook said about the life-changing power of love — that is, the act of love, and love is much broader than romantic affection. “I’m talking about a transformative love that challenges us both in our private and civic lives,” she said. “I often get emotional when I think about the civil rights movement, because I see it as a great movement for social justice rooted in love and politicizing the concept of love, that said. : True love will change you.”
She continued: “Wherever I go, people want to feel more connected. They want to feel more connected to the people around them. They want to feel more connected to the world. And when we do, they do. I know that through love we can have that connection, we can see strangers as ourselves, and I thought it would be great to have that feeling of ‘Let’s get back to the focus type. utopia in love, no different from a hippie focused on love.’ Because I always tell people, you know, the ’60s focus on love has its stupid emotional dimensions, but then it has these life-changing dimensions. love of justice led three young people, two Jews and one African-American Christian, to the South and fight for justice and give their lives, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner. is the quality of love that’s so wonderful… I say this to young people, you know, that we can love so deeply and so deeply that it transforms the political world that we’re in. living “.
Additional reporting contributed by Steve Smith.
