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Tributes were pouring in favor of the bell-hooks, who he died at the age of 69 this week, Black has confirmed his special place in the intellectual canon.
He was the author of dozens of books and hundreds of well-known articles and magazines on patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. Born in 1952, Hooks was slightly younger than Toni Morrison, Angela Davis and Alice Walker, but followed a similar path.
The moral and intellectual power of the United States has long been in decline, but it is not in vain that the writings and theorizing of black writers in that country have had a holy place in the intellectual lives of people living in the Global South. . To some extent, the brightest African-American minds continue to be inspired, precisely because their country remains very depressing.
black American hooks embodied the ability to call attention to the sins of their country and to do so from a position of marginality and authority. Criticism has allowed American black thinkers and artists to connect with the world as part of a long tradition. And the hook seriously took its place in this tradition. He wrote with absolute clarity, and was often direct and loving in his criticisms.
In fact, this week, when his readers and students said goodbye, there was a lot of talk about “love” – a word that was closely associated with the work of hooks.
At the height of his career, Hooks published a trilogy of books about love, which included both personal and political. The trilogy dealt with the devastating effects of rage and anger and, before the madness of today’s self-care, sought to offer a theory of self-love.
To some extent, Hooks’s ideas about love stemmed from his Buddhist practice and his admiration for Thich Nhat Hanh, who formed the Engaged Buddhism Movement in response to the Vietnam War.
Hooks once told an audience that he met Nhat Hanh on a day full of “bad racial encounters”. As he approached the legendary monk, the hooks later confessed: “I felt like I was here in front of this wonderful teacher and all I could get out of it was the ugliness and confusion of my rage, and of course he knew that rage with love. ”Nhat Hanh was patient with his hooks, confirmed his anger and said,“ Oh, hold on to your anger and use it as compost in your garden ”.
hooks took that message to heart. His anger fueled the writing and was responsible for the long range of his pen. His ideas about oppression and its elimination had an impact on classrooms, but they spread beyond the American campus he taught.
In the mid-1990s, when I was just starting out in international development, I was given a copy of an essay on hooks. It was written a decade earlier, in 1984, but it spoke directly to me, criticizing the kind of white feminist internationalism that prevailed in the conference rooms I was trying to navigate. hooks argued, “Many white women have told me, ‘We wanted other black and white women to join the movement,’ without fully knowing that they are somehow ‘owners’ of the movement, their perception that they are ‘hosts.’ they have us. “
I remember sitting up. Eventually I had the framing to express my discomfort, so I had a way to challenge and encourage and be more effective in my work. I was in Johannesburg, far from the American context in which hooks were written, but his words came to me.
To some extent, his effectiveness was linked to his writing on topics that were important to hooks. He had a special interest in the dissection of popular culture. Focusing on American movies and films — which have become limitless — hooks were important to readers everywhere.
I didn’t always agree with the comment I made in recent years. He called Beyoncé a terrorist and then criticized Lemonade for suggesting that the visual album was a beautiful hug from a black woman and a continuation of racial and sexualized old tropes.
In these exchanges, he was not out of his depth, but he seemed to have reached the limits of theory. Capitalism grew up in a hostile world, but could not understand that late-stage capitalism forced many women into precariousness, where resistance often resembled capitulation. Capitalism has been so defeated that the very definition of radicalism has changed. Young feminists intuitively understand this and much of their work seeks to understand this new land. However, he could not deny the strength of his arguments and the space for free thought created by his opposing views.
With Hooks mourning this week, I was amazed at how much he wrote and spoke and how seriously he tried to criticize the power. But it took me even longer to see how long his words lasted. Hooks stressed that “the function of art is to do more than to tell it, it is to imagine everything that is possible.”
Bell Hooks is gone, but he left clear instructions. Wherever we are in the world, we need to use his words — and ours — to create new perspectives.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
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