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. About the Author: bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins, 1952-2021) was a pioneering feminist whose writings revealed how the specific life experiences of Black women were marginalized by the idea that feminism represented all women equally. A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women's studies, she taught at the University of Southern California, Yale, Oberlin College, City College of New York, and Kentucky's Berea College, which established the bell hooks Institute for her work. The author of more than thirty books of literary criticism, children's fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including the New York Times bestseller All About Love: New Visions; Salvation: Black People and Love; Communion: the Female Search for Love; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life; and Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, hooks was nominated for the NAACP Image Award, won an American Book Award, and was named one of Time's 100 Women of the Year in 2020. Celebrated as one of America's leading public intellectuals, she was a charismatic speaker and writer who taught and lectured around the world. A resident of Kentucky and New York City, she died in 2021.
|