Critical Perspectives on bell hooks

Although bell hooks has long challenged the dominant paradigms of race, class, and gender, there has never been a comprehensive book critically reflecting upon this seminal scholar’s body of work. Her written works aim to transgress and disrupt those codes that exclude others as intellectually mediocre, and hooks’ challenge to various hegemonic practices has heavily influenced scholars in numerous areas of inquiry. This important resource thematically examines hooks’ works across various disciplinary divides, including her critique on educational theory and practice, theorization of racial construction, dynamics of gender, and spirituality and love as correctives in postmodern life. Ultimately, this book offers a fresh perspective for scholars and students wanting to engage in the prominent work of bell hooks, and makes available to its readers the full significance of her work. Compelling and unprecedented, Critical Perspectives on bell hooks is a must-read for scholars, professors, and students interested in issues of race, class, and gender.

Introduction, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson and George Yancy

Part One: Critical Pedagogy and Praxis

1. Borderlines: bell hooks and the Pedagogy of Revolutionary Change, Nathalia E. Jaramillo and Peter McLaren

2. Engaging Whiteness and the Practice Freedom: The Creation Of Subversive Academic Spaces, George Yancy

3. Teaching to Transgress: Deconstructing Normalcy and Re-signifying the Marked Body, Cindy LaCom and Susan Hadley

4. Bell hooks, White Supremacy, and the Academy, Tim Davidson and Jeanette R. Davidson

5. Engaging bell hooks: How Teacher Educators Can Work to Sustain Themselves and Their Work, Gretchen Givens Generett

6. Bell hooks’ Children’s Literature: Writing to Transform the World at its Root, Carme Manuel

Part Two: The Dynamics of Race and Gender

7. Talking Back: bell hooks, Feminism, and Philosophy, Donna-Dale L. Marcano

8. Bell hooks and the Move from Marginalized Other to Radical Black Subject, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson

9. The Ethics of Blackness: bell hooks’ Postmodern Blackness and the Imperative of Liberation, Clevis Headley

10. The Specter of Race: bell hooks, Deconstruction, and Revolutionary Blackness, Arnold Farr

Part Three: Spirituality and Love

11. Love Matters: bell hooks on Political Resistance and Change, Kathy Glass

12. Love, Politics, and Ethics in the Postmodern Feminist Work of bell hooks and Julia Kristeva, Marilyn Edelstein

13. "Revolutionary Interdependence": bell hooks’ Ethic of Love as a Basis for a Feminist Liberation Theology of the Neighbor, Nancy E. Nienhuis

14. Towards a Love Ethic: Love and Spirituality in bell hooks’ Writing, Susana Vega-González

Maria Del Guadalupe Davidson is Assistant Professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Oklahoma.

George Yancy teaches in the Philosophy Department at Duquesne University.