Book Catalog
Books
Browse books written by bell hooks, conference speakers, organizers, and attendees. All featured books contain links to black-owned independent bookstores when available.
Below are books published by bell hooks and books about her legacy.
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
bell hooks
A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain’t I a Woman has become a must-read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman’s involvement with feminism, hooks attempts to move us beyond racist and sexist assumptions. The result is nothing short of groundbreaking, giving this book a critical place on every feminist scholar’s bookshelf.
All About Love: New Visions
All About Love: New Visions
bell hooks
A New York Times bestseller and enduring classic, All About Love is the acclaimed first volume in feminist icon bell hooks’ “Love Song to the Nation” trilogy. All About Love reveals what causes a polarized society, and how to heal the divisions that cause suffering. Here is the truth about love, and inspiration to help us instill caring, compassion, and strength in our homes, schools, and workplaces.
“The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, renowned scholar, cultural critic and feminist bell hooks offers a proactive new ethic for a society bereft with lovelessness–not the lack of romance, but the lack of care, compassion, and unity. People are divided, she declares, by society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.
As bell hooks uses her incisive mind to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. Razing the cultural paradigm that the ideal love is infused with sex and desire, she provides a new path to love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for individuals and for a nation. The Utne Reader declared bell hooks one of the “100 Visionaries Who Can Change Your Life.” All About Love is a powerful, timely affirmation of just how profoundly her revelations can change hearts and minds for the better.
Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
bell hooks
Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation’s leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand up against a dominating and repressive society. Her poetry, novels, memoirs, and children’s books reflect her Appalachian upbringing and feature her struggles with racially integrated schools and unwel.
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
bell hooks
“As erudite and sophisticated as hooks is, she is also eminently readable, even exhilarating.” —Booklist
In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.
Be Boy Buzz
Be Boy Buzz
bell hooks
From legendary author and critic bell hooks and multi-Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka comes an acclaimed ode to Black boy joy, perfect for fans of I Am Every Good Thing and I Am Enough.
I be boy. All bliss boy. All fine beat. All beau boy. Beautiful.
Here a tight, exuberant story from two award-winning creators that captures the essence and energy of what it means to be a boy. Chris Raschka’s soulful illustrations buzz with a force that is the perfect match for bell hooks’ powerful words.
Praise for Be Boy Buzz:*”This spare, poetic riff on young manhood plumbs the delights and contradictions of what it means to be a boy… Hooks’s rhythmic blend of brevity and eloquence launches Raschka’s trademark visual haiku… This life-affirming book will have readers as much ‘in love with being a boy’ as are its own utterly irresistible characters.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
bell hooks; A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory
bell hooks; A Critical Introduction to Media and Communication Theory
David W. Park and Catherine R. Squires
bell hooks’ writings have been touchstones for major debates in the culture wars , fostering insight into many central questions in communication studies. Her work is vital to students and scholars who explore the ways in which media shape our sense of our selves, our roles, and those with whom we interact. This book provides readers with a measured, contextualized introduction to how hooks’ writings on media and culture enhance our understanding of key concepts in communication. hooks’ insistence on focusing our attention on the workings of power and the impact of history and her willingness to explore connections between individual and group experiences have produced provocative, fruitful conjectures about media and culture.
Bell Hooks' Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness (Critical Studies in Education & Culture)
Bell Hooks' Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness (Critical Studies in Education & Culture)
Namulundah Florence
This work lucidates bell hooks’ social and educational theory, with emphasis on her 1994 book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Florence deals with the issues of marginality and cultural alienation that are so prevalent among certain groups within the American society and presents strategies to help develop critical consciousness and affirmation of formerly subordinated cultural traits and characteristics. Her study resonates with current themes raised by critical, feminist and multicultural scholars showing how marginalized groups may be guilty of reinforcing their own status through complicity with the dominant culture’s world view, and how education can empower them to demand a more egalitarian society and one that recognizes cultural plurality.
bell hooks & Paulo Freire: A Critique of Transgressive Teaching & Critical Pedagogy
bell hooks & Paulo Freire: A Critique of Transgressive Teaching & Critical Pedagogy
Benton Fazzolari
bell hooks and Paulo Freire epitomize the best that progressive pedagogy and politics have to offer to educators. Their work lays a foundation for progressive educators to apply in their classrooms at every level of education.
This book critiques their most important pedagogical texts, such as hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Pedagogy in Process in order to contextualize them into the various educational settings that confront educators everyday.
This book provides a solid foundation in the pedagogical methods, theories, and practices of bell hooks and Paulo Freire and serves as a guide for all educators who aim to teach to transgress and practice critical pedagogy in their classrooms
It also presents ways in which educators can apply transgressive teaching and critical pedagogy in their classrooms by examining the teaching of policing, competition, individualism, hard work, capitalism, classism, and communication.
This book is a must read for critical educators everywhere who aim to understand and apply the pedagogical ideas of bell hooks and Paulo Freire
bell hooks: The Biography
bell hooks: The Biography
Rose Stones
Gloria Jean Watkins September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name “bell hooks” is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.
The focus of hooks’s writing was the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.
bell hooks was a cultural critic, feminist, and writer who had a crucial part in modern activism. Well celebrated and recognized as one of America’s great scholars, she was a charming speaker who splits her time between educating, composing books, and teaching at different locations globally.
Her wide labor of love teaching and writing has investigated the authentic capacity of race and sexual orientation in America. Hooks‘ works are profoundly based on her personal experiences, drawing on her own difficult encounters of bigotry and sexism with an end goal to teach the people the best way to battle them.
hooks likewise had an influence from Buddhism, with the attraction of motivation from Buddhist practice in her life and her work. Her discussions with various significant Buddhist pioneers have been distributed on her works, alongside her view on religion, race, women’s liberation, and life. Her works are interesting on the grounds that she, for the most part, focuses her writings on the interconnection of gender and race.
Belonging: A Culture of Place
Belonging: A Culture of Place
bell hooks
What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong?
These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place. Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began–her old Kentucky home.
hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link of the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.
With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people–wherever they may call home–can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.
Black Looks: Race and Representation
Black Looks: Race and Representation
bell hooks
In the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship–in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film–and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert. As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that’s exactly what these pieces do.
Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
bell hooks
“A canvas of vividly impressionistic splashes of growing up young, gifted, Black, and female.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
In this memoir of perceptions and ideas, renowned feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a stirringly intimate account of growing up in the South. Stitching together the gossamer threads of her girlhood memories, hooks shows us one strong-spirited child’s journey toward becoming a writer. Along the way, hooks sheds light on the vulnerability of children, the special unfurling of female creativity, and the imbalance of a society that confers marriage’s joys upon men and its silences on women. In a world where daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about, hooks uncovers the solace to be found in solitude, the comfort to be had in the good company of books.
Bone Black allows us to bear witness to the awakening of a legendary author’s awareness that writing is her most vital breath.
“With the emotion of poetry, the narrative of a novel, and the truth of experience, bell hooks weaves a girlhood memoir you won’t be able to put down—or forget. Bone Black takes us into the cave of self-creation.” —Gloria Steinem
Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life
Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life
bell hooks and Cornel West
In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life where people come together to give themselves, to nurture life, to renew their spirits, sustain their hopes, and to make a lived politics of revolutionary struggle an ongoing practice.
This 25th anniversary edition continues the dialogue with In Solidarity, their 2016 conversation at the bell hooks Institute on racism, politics, popular culture and the contemporary Black experience.
Communion: The Female Search for Love
Communion: The Female Search for Love
bell hooks
“When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens.” –Maya Angelou
Renowned visionary bell hooks explored the meaning of love in American culture with the critically acclaimed bestseller All About Love: New Visions. She continued her national dialogue with the bestselling Salvation: Black People and Love. Now hooks culminates her triumphant trilogy of love with Communion: The Female Search for Love.
Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women’s full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help, and reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives, for all the years of their lives.
Communion is the heart-to-heart talk every woman — mother, daughter, friend, and lover — needs to have.
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
bell hooks
What is feminism? In this short, accessible primer, bell hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives–to see that feminism is for everybody.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
bell hooks
When Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was first published in 1984, it was welcomed and praised by feminist thinkers who wanted a new vision. Even so, individual readers frequently found the theory unsettling or provocative. Today, the blueprint for feminist movement presented in the book remains as provocative and relevant as ever. Written in hooks’s characteristic direct style, Feminist Theory embodies the hope that feminists can find a common language to spread the word and create a mass, global feminist movement.
Happy to Be Nappy
Happy to Be Nappy
bell hooks
The groundbreaking picture book by legendary author bell hooks and multi-Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka that celebrates hair, perfect for fans of Hair Love and I Love My Hair!
Happy with hair all short and strong. Happy with locks that twist and curl.
Just all girl happy! Happy to be nappy hair!
Nominated for an NAACP Image Award, here is a buoyantly fun read aloud brimming with playful — and powerful — affirmations.
Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism
Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism
bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains
In Homegrown, cultural critics bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains reflect on the innate solidarity between Black and Latino culture. Riffing on everything from home and family to multiculturalism and the mass media, hooks and Mesa-Bains invite readers to re-examine and confront the polarizing mainstream discourse about Black-Latino relationships that is too often negative in its emphasis on political splits between people of color. A work of activism through dialogue, Homegrown is a declaration of solidarity that rings true even ten years after its first publication.
This new edition includes a new afterword, in which Mesa-Bains reflects on the changes, conflicts, and criticisms of the last decade.
Homemade Love
Homemade Love
bell hooks
The world-renowned poet, cultural critic, feminist theorist, intellectual, and award-winning author, bell hooks, brings together with the resplendent artwork of Shane W. Evan, a beautiful board book perfect for little hands.
“The rhythm of the words, the smoothness of the text, and the positive message all combine to make a lovely read-aloud.”School Library Journal
“[Evans’s] cheerful, splashy paintings display an abundance of affection between the girl and her parents.”Publishers Weekly
Her Mama calls her Girlpie-a sweet treat, homemade with love. And when Girlpie makes a mistake, the love of her mother and father lets her pick up the pieces and make everything right again.
killing rage: Ending Racism
killing rage: Ending Racism
bell hooks
“hooks’s books help us not only to decolonize our minds, souls, and bodies; on a deeper level, they touch our lives.” —Cornel West
More than two decades before Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movement roiled America, bell hooks was declaring that abolishing racism and eradicating sexism must go hand in hand. In Killing Rage, one of our premier cultural and social critics brings the Black feminist’s voice to bear on this country’s public discourse on race, redressing the historical shunting of women’s writing in this sphere to the side. In incisive essays, hooks addresses the wide spectrum of topics dealing with race and racism in the United States: friendship between Black women and white women; psychological trauma among African Americans; and internalized racism in movies and the media. hooks tackles the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it, sharing a vision where “killing rage”—the fierce anger of Black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism—offers not only a wellspring of love and strength, but also a realistic catalyst for positive change.
This seminal book is one Americans need today if we’re to remain united tomorrow.
“An angry book that pulls no punches…. Her frankness and willingness to face up to the divisive issues that refuse to go away make her a voice to be reckoned with in the debate on race in America.” —The New York Review of Books
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
bell hooks
According to the Washington Post, no one who cares about contemporary African-American cultures can ignore bell hooks’ electrifying feminist explorations. Targeting cultural icons as diverse as Madonna and Spike Lee, Outlaw Culture presents a collection of essays that pulls no punches. As hooks herself notes, interrogations of popular culture can be a ‘powerful site for intervention, challenge and change’. And intervene, challenge and change is what hooks does best.
Reel to Real: Race, class and sex at the movies
Reel to Real: Race, class and sex at the movies
bell hooks
Movies matter – that is the message of Reel to Real, bell hooks’ classic collection of essays on film. They matter on a personal level, providing us with unforgettable moments, even life-changing experiences and they can confront us, too, with the most profound social issues of race, sex and class. Here bell hooks – one of America’s most celebrated and thrilling cultural critics – talks back to films that have moved and provoked her, from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to the work of Spike Lee. Including also her conversations with master filmmakers such as Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, Reel to Real is a must read for anyone who believes that movies are worth arguing about.
remembered rapture: the writer at work
remembered rapture: the writer at work
bell hooks
“Even though writing is a solitary act, when I sit with words that I trust will be read by someone, I know that I can never be truly alone.” —bell hooks, “women who write too much”
In this timeless essay collection on the writing life, award-winning author and renowned thinker bell hooks shares the secrets gleaned from years of facing the blank page, pen in hand.
At a time when the death of the book has been proclaimed, hooks’s Remembered Rapture beats with a pulsing passion for words, reminding us of literacy’s potency and the vital joys of reading and writing. In contemplative essays infused with her personal experience, hooks reveals her wide-ranging intellectual scope. With insight and vision, hooks untangles the complex personae of women writers, especially those whose work goes against the grain.
This inspiring collection from a treasured American author is for everyone who believes in the power of the written word.
“For anyone who writes, or seeks to understand the writing process, or wants to know more about the erudite and passionate mind of bell hooks, this is the book to read.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem
Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem
bell hooks
World-renowned scholar and visionary bell hooks takes an in-depth look at one of the most critical issues facing African Americans: a collective wounded self-esteem that has prevailed from slavery to the present day.
Why do so many African-Americans—whether privileged or poor, urban or suburban, young or old—live in a state of chronic anxiety, fear, and shame? Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem breaks through collective denial and dares to tell this truth—that crippling low self-esteem has reached epidemic proportions in our lives and in our diverse communities. With visionary insight, hooks exposes the underlying reality that it has been difficult—if not impossible—for our nation to create a culture that promotes and sustains healthy self-esteem. Without self-esteem people begin to lose their sense of agency. They feel powerless. They feel they can only be victims. The need for self-esteem never goes away. But it is never too late for any of us to acquire the healthy self-esteem that is needed for a fulfilling life.
hooks gets to the heart and soul of the African-American identity crisis, offering critical insight and hard-won wisdom about what it takes to heal the scars of the past, promote and maintain self-esteem, and lay down the roots for a grounded community with a prosperous future. She examines the way historical movements for racial uplift fail to sustain our quest for self-esteem.
Moving beyond a discussion of race, she identifies diverse barriers keeping us from well-being: the trauma of abandonment, constant shaming, and the loss of personal integrity. In highlighting the role of desegregation, education, the absence of progressive parenting, spiritual crisis, or fundamental breakdowns in communication between black women and men, bell hooks identifies mental health as the new revolutionary frontier—and provides guidance for healing within the black community.
Salvation: Black People and Love
Salvation: Black People and Love
bell hooks
“A manual for fixing our culture…In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process.”—Black Issues Book Review
New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed visionary and cultural critic bell hooks continues her exploration of the meaning of love in contemporary American society, offering groundbreaking, critical insight about Black people and love.
Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans. Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships and marriage in Black life, the prose and poetry of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, the liberation movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, or hip hop and gangsta rap culture, hooks lets us know what love’s got to do with it.
Combining the passionate politics of W.E.B. DuBois with fresh, contemporary insights, hooks brilliantly offers new visions that will heal our nation’s wounds from a culture of lovelessness. Her writings on love and its impact on race, class, family, history, and popular culture will help us heal and create beloved American communities.
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery
bell hooks
In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.
Skin Again
Skin Again
bell hooks
From legendary author and critic bell hooks and multi-Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka comes a new way to talk about race and identity that will appeal to parents of the youngest readers.
The skin I’m in is just a covering. It cannot tell my story. If you want to know who I am, you have got to come inside and open your heart way wide.
Race matters, but only so much–what’s most important is who we are on the inside. Looking beyond skin, going straight to the heart, we find in each other the treasures stored down deep. Learning to cherish those treasures, to be all we imagine ourselves to be, makes us free.
This award-winning book, celebrates all that makes us unique and different and offers a strong, timely and timeless message of loving yourself and others.
Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
bell hooks
In childhood, bell hooks was taught that talking back meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion. In this collection of personal and theoretical essays, hooks reflects on her signature issues of racism and feminism, politics and pedagogy. Among her discoveries is that moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, making new life and new growth possible.
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
bell hooks
Ten years ago, bell hooks astonished readers with Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Now comes Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope – a powerful, visionary work that will enrich our teaching and our lives. Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning. bell hooks writes candidly about her own experiences. Teaching, she explains, can happen anywhere, any time – not just in college classrooms but in churches, in bookstores, in homes where people get together to share ideas that affect their daily lives.
In Teaching Community bell hooks seeks to theorize from the place of the positive, looking at what works. Writing about struggles to end racism and white supremacy, she makes the useful point that No one is born a racist. Everyone makes a choice. Teaching Community tells us how we can choose to end racism and create a beloved community. hooks looks at many issues-among them, spirituality in the classroom, white people looking to end racism, and erotic relationships between professors and students. Spirit, struggle, service, love, the ideals of shared knowledge and shared learning – these values motivate progressive social change.
Teachers of vision know that democratic education can never be confined to a classroom. Teaching – so often undervalued in our society — can be a joyous and inclusive activity. bell hooks shows the way. When teachers teach with love, combining care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we are often able to enter the classroom and go straight to the heart of the matter, which is knowing what to do on any given day to create the best climate for learning.
Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
bell hooks
In Teaching Critical Thinking, renowned cultural critic and progressive educator bell hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today.
In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, hooks explores the confounding and sometimes controversial topics that teachers and students have urged her to address since the publication of the previous best-selling volumes in her Teaching series, Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community. The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked how black female professors can maintain positive authority in a classroom without being seen through the lens of negative racist, sexist stereotypes. One teacher asked how to handle tears in the classroom, while another wanted to know how to use humor as a tool for learning.
Addressing questions of race, gender, and class in this work, hooks discusses the complex balance that allows us to teach, value, and learn from works written by racist and sexist authors. Highlighting the importance of reading, she insists on the primacy of free speech, a democratic education of literacy. Throughout these essays, she celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking. This is provocative, powerful, and joyful intellectual work. It is a must read for anyone who is at all interested in education today.
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
bell hooks
After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks’s never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving. — Paulo Freire
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks–writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual–writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to transgress against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for hooks, the teacher’s most important goal.
bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?
Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.
To educate is the practice of freedom, writes bell hooks, is a way of teaching anyone can learn. Teaching to Transgress is the record of one gifted teacher’s struggle to make classrooms work.
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
bell hooks
Everyone needs to love and be loved—even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.
In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are—whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. But toxic masculinity punishes those fundamental emotions, and it’s so deeply ingrained in our society that it’s hard for men to not comply—but hooks wants to help change that.
With trademark candor and fierce intelligence, hooks addresses the most common concerns of men, such as fear of intimacy and loss of their patriarchal place in society, in new and challenging ways. She believes men can find the way to spiritual unity by getting back in touch with the emotionally open part of themselves—and lay claim to the rich and rewarding inner lives that have historically been the exclusive province of women. A brave and astonishing work, The Will to Change is designed to help men reclaim the best part of themselves.
Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue
Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue
bell hooks and Stuart Hall
In an awesome meeting of minds, cultural theorists Stuart Hall and bell hooks met for a series of wide-ranging conversations on what Hall sums up as life, love, death, sex. From the trivial to the profound, across boundaries of age, sexualities and genders, hooks and Hall dissect topics and themes of continual contemporary relevance, including feminism, home and homecoming, class, black masculinity, family, politics, relationships, and teaching. In their fluid and honest dialogue they push and pull each other as well as the reader, and the result is a book that speaks to the power of conversation as a place of critical pedagogy.
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
bell hooks
When women get together and talk about men, the news is almost always bad news, writes bell hooks. If the topic gets specific and the focus is on black men, the news is even worse.
In this powerful new book, bell hooks arrests our attention from the first page. Her title–WeReal Cool; her subject–the way in which both white society and weak black leaders are failing black men and youth. Her subject is taboo: this is a culture that does not love black males: they are not loved by white men, white women, black women, girls or boys. And especially, black men do not love themselves. How could they? How could they be expected to love, surrounded by so much envy, desire, and hate?
When Angels Speak of Love
When Angels Speak of Love
bell hooks
Icon of women’s movement and author of over twenty books, including a narrative series on love, bell hooks reminds us of the good and bad moments we spend in love through her inspiring poetry.
When Angels Speak of Love is a book of 50 love poems by the icon of the feminist movement and most famous among public intellectuals. In beautiful, profoundly poetic terms, hooks challenges our views and experiences with love—tracing the link between seduction and surrender, the intensity of desire, and the anguish of death. Whether towards family, friends, or oneself, hooks’s creative genius makes love both magical and beautiful. Her poems are written from the heart and learned by the reader’s heart.
Where We Stand: Class Matters
Where We Stand: Class Matters
bell hooks
Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, Where We Stand is a successful black woman’s reflection–personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest–on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.
Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life
Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life
bell hooks
“bell hooks’s brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence.” —Gloria Steinem
With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writer’s journey in Wounds of Passion. She shares the difficulties and triumphs, the pleasures and the dangers, of a life devoted to writing. hooks lets readers see the ways one woman writer can find her own voice while forging relationships of love in keeping with her feminist thinking. With unflinching courage and hard-won wisdom, hooks reveals the intimate details and provocative ideas of the life path she carved out of words, lighting the way for all writers who would tread in her wake.
This memoir is an illuminating vision of a writer’s life from one of America’s treasured authors.
“I love this book. Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us.” —Maya Angelou
Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice
Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice
bell hooks
What are the conditions needed for our nation to bridge cultural and racial divides? By writing beyond race, noted cultural critic bell hooks models the constructive ways scholars, activists, and readers can challenge and change systems of domination.
In the spirit of previous classics like Outlaw Culture and Reel to Real, this new collection of compelling essays interrogates contemporary cultural notions of race, gender, and class. From the films Precious and Crash to recent biographies of Malcolm X and Henrietta Lacks, hooks offers provocative insights into the way race is being talked about in this post-racial era.
Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
bell hooks
For bell hooks, the best cultural criticism sees no need to separate politics from the pleasure of reading. Yearning collects together some of hooks’s classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the ’80s. Addressing topics like pedagogy, postmodernism, and politics, hooks examines a variety of cultural artifacts, from Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing and Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire to the writings of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. The result is a poignant collection of essays which, like all of hooks’s work, is above all else concerned with transforming oppressive structures of domination.
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