Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue

by bell hooks

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Queer, Audiobook

ebook

Published October 19, 2017

About the author

bell hooks (deliberately in lower-case; born Gloria Jean Watkins) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

Reviews

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first book by Stuart Hall, but not a typical one because it was more just a conversation between bell hooks and him, which they self-reflexively discuss in some portions of the book. Very conducive to listen to as an audiobook, which I did. Interesting and enjoyable, and wow did bell hooks really go off on Cornel West in this thing. I still have mixed opinions about bell hooks, but many people I admire a lot, have only good things to say about her. This book made me want to read more Stuart Hall. I also would like to read more stuff on popular education and critical pedagogy by bell hooks, when I have the time (something that the MLK Center in Cuba does to you after a visit). I'll end with a little conversational quote by bell hooks (and a fragment of a discussion on Fanon afterwards):

"But in terms of speaking, of feeling that you can speak back to something, that sense of interrogation comes sometimes with feeling that you are the closer kin. It becomes a symbolic family bond, in the sense that it has been historically more difficult for black women to bring a feminist critique to bear without thinking about what the implications are in terms of racial identity and racial solidarity. We have been working to overcome that intimidation. In many ways I never felt that intimidation, and I think it is generational again. Part of what separates me from some of the older black women Marxist feminists is that I was a young student in the seventies. I came into Marxist thinking from feminism, and that is an altogether different location of power and of voice."

Hall and hooks on Fanon:

"bell: This is exactly how I see the overall situation of black people in the diaspora. That our crisis is as much a mental health crisis as it is an economic crisis. There are so many ways in which, particularly the patriarchal leadership globally around matters of race and blackness, is always more willing to acknowledge an economic crisis, poverty, even a crisis of masculinity, but not a mental health crisis that would really go back to the work of say Frantz Fanon. Why haven’t we taken up that work? Why aren’t there hundreds and hundreds of black psychotherapists and psychoanalysts globally who are amassing a whole world of knowledge that would enable us and empower us? Precisely because in the face of that crisis we have established enabling, romantic myths about our lives, about blackness. For me that is what Afrocentrism is in its crudest form. It is an enabling, romantic, utopian myth that is enchanting to so many people precisely because it keeps them away from a recognition of the state of our woundedness, of our collected woundedness.

Stuart: That has always been the most difficult level upon which to talk about black experience, and it’s also why one never stops reading Fanon. It is a level that for one reason or another he was able to profoundly see into in a way that very few people even now are able to.

bell: But it is not just that they haven’t seen into it, but that they haven’t wanted to investigate it. Many people have wanted to close those doors. In fact, we get, not Fanon, but the sort of crude interpretation of Greer and Cobbs in Black Rage that becomes a bastardized version of Fanon, but one that is not enabling at all."

[ink · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was so fun and interesting… i wanted to chime in so bad

[Shelflife_wasBooklooker]

"it was a hot summer in 1996" when bell hooks and Stuart Hall "met for traditional afternoon English tea at a grand hotel and [...] talked." Paul Gilroy had made the suggestion for this congenial, it turned out, teaming up. As agreed in advance, they recorded their conversations on tape and the tapes were transcribed by one of bell hooks's students, who stated she learnt a lot from the dialogues.

So did I. It was wonderful to listen in, as a reader, to this long-ago exchange that felt fresh and engaging to me. Both prove not just brilliant talkers but also active listeners ("What I understand is..." "Do you mean by that...?" W-questions etc.), one topic seguing into another. Seguing feels the right word, as at the end of the book, they make a comparison with improvisation in jazz to describe their conversations. On which topics?

bell: [...] you and I have just plopped down, gotten our drinks, and said: "oh, the topics that we can draw on, are depression, love, death."
stuart: Yes, people have asked me what are you two talking about, and I say, "oh, you know, life, love, death, sex."

Also, family histories, a sense of displacement I could strongly identify with, leaving home to make it elsewhere, desire, what is talked and is not talked about in public opinion and theoretical debates, race, class, feminism, heteronormativity, how to sustain an activist lifestyle (or not), how to hope.

I read this book in one go today, unexpectedly, and I would have liked to listen in for much longer. Perhaps appositely, the end of the book feels a bit forced and tending just a tad towards the sentimental in comparison to what came before - bell hooks trying for a sort of closure in the conversation which I, and possibly the participants, felt could have gone on for much longer. It would have been wonderful to hear their take on later events and on developments in theoretical approaches. (Much of the conversation reads uncomfortably prescient to me.) Loved their wry, self-ironic view on academic settings and the ways they can limit or prescribe the exchange of ideas: The whole conversation is meant as a different form of creative, dialogic communication.

There are many more topics I would like to mention, and passages I would like to quote from. I will leave it for today, though. Will be happy to replay this conversation in any case: I could not help marking many passages with a pencil.

Really glad bell hooks (and Paul Gilroy, with a very world-weary foreword) brought out this book.
Just wondering why so late, in 2017?
If anybody knows more, do please share your thoughts.

[manbowsss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughts on love, death and politics. The discussion on the limits of academic discourse stood out to me, and ironically seemed embodied in the text...

[Aina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idees d'una lucidesa, complexitat i profunditat magnífiques. El pas de conversa a text es fa difícil, moltes referències entre ells que el lector difícilment capta i alguna sintaxi confusa.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It was race. Race in a very complicated way. It was race in the colonial setting, race inside my family, not black/white race, but the way in which my family had internalized race, and then used it as a way of categorizing the world. It was my awareness of race in that sense, and I never lost that notion of race as both a public structure and a psychic, personal experience."

[Sarah Schulman]

Loved this. bell is so thoughtful about queer issues, and Hall tries to keep up.

[Mai · Rating 2 out of 5]

This dialogue between bell hooks and Stuart Hall is not entirely uninteresting but completely skippable in my opinion. I find bell hooks quite flirty with Hall here (and you guys will tell me if I'm the only one to see that), which seems unprofessional but maybe they're friends and it's a running joke between them? I appreciate their scepticism of essentialism, fixed categories and liberal politics. The few passages where they share their writing process, their life, origine and family were also very fascinating. Ultimately an ok read that I wouldn't necessarily recommend to everyone unless you're a serial bell hooks/Stuart Hall reader, haha.

"bell hooks: I look at my mother and think about her raising seven kids without an automatic washing machine, and what the daily-ness of her life meant just in terms of laundry, the hours of her life that were given to this chore. I wake up in a world where I have no children, things hardly get dirty, and then I have someone come in to gather those dirty things to whisk them away and to bring them back clean. It creates lots of generational conflicts that are not talked about, a certain kind of contempt my mother has for my life, because she feels that my life is in some way an indictment of the life she lived." (64-65)

"Stuart: That is a very important point about so-called identity politics. Very often social movements can only advance, as it were, by constructing an apparently unified, apparently essentialized, apparently homogeneous identity on behalf of which claims have to be made, because that is the only way in which you can conduct a struggle. But within that you occupy a fictional space, because the actual space in which that identity becomes a site of agency, desire, action is much more diverse, much more serialized than that identity would suggest. I don’t think one has to undermine the politics of the claim. It is better to rethink the nature of the identity or identification which is called on." (76)

[Lara Facchi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un testo "minore" rispetto ad altri di Bell Hooks, eppure ugualmente incisivo: lontana dal politicamente corretto, lontana dall' autocompiacimento, lontana dal proprio ruolo di filosofa e insegnante, Bell Hooks si racconta a tutto tondo e ci regala una "chiacchierata da bar" originale, autentica e profonda.
Consigliato.

[Daniel Adediran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Conversation

Conversation that ran the gamut of topics. Definitely recommend it to fans of either thinkers. Left me with a lot more reading and viewing than I went into it with.

[Frank Karioris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a funk that we should all be able to appreciate. Review forthcoming possibly.

[Michael Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engaging lengthy conversation between Bell Hooks and Stuart Hall.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

i have not read anything by stuart hall prior to this and i absolutely loved it. this is a conversation between stuart hall and bell hooks, i recommend listening to it on audio it’s not long.

[counter-hegemonicon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The discussion of the lack of a subsequent generation to carry on hooks’ generation’s liberatory work stands out, especially with the current state of Black gender politics.

[Cristina Lara · Rating 2 out of 5]

No conecté con el libro. Si hay que hay temáticas interesantes, pero me sentí muy alejada de los temas de conversación. Esperaba más.

[aj! · Rating 3 out of 5]

i really love stuart hall and what he has to say here, but found bell hooks less engaging in this than in other works i've read of hers

[Arianna Capasso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Discorso davvero interessante, specialmente perché il pensiero di intellettuali nere è poco coperto nella società bianca in cui siamo cresciute