Black Looks: Race and Representation / Edition 1

by bell hooks

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780896084339
Publisher:	South End Press
Publication date:	07/01/1999
Edition description:	Older Edition
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

A cultural critic, an intellectual, and a feminist writer, bell hooks is best known for classic books including Ain’t I a Woman, Bone Black, All About Love, Rock My Soul, Belonging, We Real Cool, Where We Stand, Teaching to Transgress, Teaching Community, Outlaw Culture, and Reel to Real. hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College, and resides in her home state of Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Preface to the New Edition Introduction 1. Loving Blackness as Political Resistance 2. Eating the Other 3. Revolutionary Black Women 4. Selling Hot Pussy 5. A Feminist Challenge 6. Reconstructing Black Masculinity 7. The Oppositional Gaze 8. Micheaux's Films 9. Is Paris Burning? 10. Madonna 11. Representations of Whiteness 12. Revolutionary "Renegades"

Editorial Reviews

This latest collection from hooks ( Yearning ) contains a dozen recent essays on the representation of the African American experience, an area in which, she argues convincingly, little progress has been made. The author draws more effectively on her own experiences and sense of identity than do most other writers in the critical theory arena. Her gaze often falls on the ostensible recuperation of blackness into advertising, fashion and pop culture. She denounces white radicals' appropriation of an African American Other that revels in the oneness of a ``primitive'' people with nature. As she points out, the next step in that process is the commodification of the ``primitive'' by consumer culture. In other essays hooks offers brilliant analyses of the Hill-Thomas hearings and of Madonna, forcing readers to confront issues of race and representation that fans of the Material Girl would probably rather ignore and revealing the underlying reactionary bent of her music and videos. Equally striking is hooks's linkage of feminism and gay and lesbian liberation to black liberation, with a resulting rejection of a narrow and facile nationalism. Imbued with hooks's theoretical rigor, intellectual integrity, breadth of knowledge and passion, this book is a necessary read for anyone concerned with race in America. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hooks continues to produce some of the most challenging, insightful, and provocative writing on race and gender in the United States today. In these new essays,the author/academician expands on a theme introduced in Breaking Bread with Cornel West ( LJ 12/91) and in earlier works: In a society that increasingly substitutes style for substance, how are the races represented to one another? Maintaining that white commodification cannibalizes African American culture, sell ing blacks a supermacho image that encourages violence and the subjugation of black women, hooks successfully confronts last fall's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, imperialist images in yuppie mail-order catalogs, Madonna's use of black signifiers, the curious color blindness of feminist film criticism, relations between blacks and Native Americans, and other original and important topics. Highly recommended.-- Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.

Library Journal

Praise for the book:

"This latest collection from hooks contains a dozen recent essays on the representation of the African American experience, an area in which, she argues convincingly, little progress has been made. . . . Imbued with hooks's theoretical rigor, intellectual integrity, breadth of knowledge and passion, this book is a necessary read for anyone concerned with race in America." —Publishers Weekly (1999)

"hooks’s essays raise many of the most significant debates within black cultural life of recent times, such as relations between the sexes and the dangers of racial essentialism inherent in all forms of black nationalism. . . . She casts a fresh perspective on aspects of black women’s writing and black feminist theorising…" —Sally Keenan, Journal of American Studies (1995)

From the Publisher