as a white woman, i always expect to learn something new from bell hooks, yet it always takes my breath away when it comes. we can all do better, always!

Thought provoking and refreshing as always!

I wonder why this collection of essays isn't more well-known. Reading bell hooks before 1998-99 is such a treat. The language does sound more objective and the arguments more nuanced than her later works, say "All about love" or "The will to change".

The collection suffers a bit from miscellaneousness: the two self-interviews at the end and the dialogue with Cornel West right before seem a bit random but will later become a stapel in her later books of this format.

The film critiques sound super fascinating but without having seen the movies I really can't tell how off or on point her critiques are, interesting nevertheless. Same with the essays on ethnography, Zora Neale Hurston and malcolm X, if you haven't read the works she discussed, it wouldn't be super engaging reads either.

The rest is great!

In the 3rd essay, bell hooks discusses postmodernism in academia at the time, its pitfalls and potential, how important it can be for anti-racist movements.

The 4th essay is about history, memory and black Americans' struggle. It does touch a bit on postmodernism again especially the postmodernists' tendency to dismiss normal black folks' conceptions of "black soul", "authenticity",... due to postmodernism's rejection of essentialism. Though constructing an idea of "the black experience/essence/soul/..." can be dangerous in her view (for example, labeling people as "not black enough", "oreo",... which bell hooks has seen first hand as a professor), there's a reason why this construction exists: the images people have about "authentic/real black life" are rooted in the history of Southern rural black folks - which should be regarded as a legacy and not as an essence, bell hooks said "We can value and cherish the “meaning” of this experience without essentializing it". She finds the contemptuous dismissal of this phenomenon to be disturbing, saying "Already coping with a sense of extreme fragmentation and alienation, black folks cannot afford the luxury of such dismissal". She goes on to talk a bit more about history, which I find to be pertinent.

The 5th essay (Homeplace: a site of resistance) is my favorite from this collection. bell hooks points out how the gigantic labor of black women in maintaining home (social reproduction, in short, even though she didn't once use this word or mention materialist feminists in this essay). She talks about the absolutely crucial role this labor plays in struggle against oppression and how it has been completely ignored by black men in the anti-racist movements.

There's many other interesting essays as well, especially the 10th one where the TEA IS PIPING HOT. bell hooks talks here about solidarity among feminists and recounts a very bad experience at a conference where a very prominent Third World feminist scholar, who's older than hooks and "whose work has received the most extensive legitimation in privileged white academic circles", basically trashed her in "very fancy terms". I couldn't find any info about this but something is telling me she was talking about Spivak... But I guess we'll never know, lol.

But yes, read this collection, and if possible watch the movies she critiqued first.