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Olhares negros: raça e representação
Na coletânea de ensaios críticos reunidos em Olhares negros, bell hooks interroga narrativas e discute a respeito de formas alternativas de observar a negritude, a subjetividade das pessoas negras e a branquitude. Ela foca no espectador — em especial, no modo como a experiência da negritude e das pessoas negras surge na literatura, na música, na televisão e, sobretudo, no cinema —, e seu objetivo é criar uma intervenção radical na forma como nós falamos de raça e representação. Em suas palavras, “os ensaios de Olhares negros se destinam a desafiar e inquietar, a subverter e serem disruptivos”. Como podem atestar os estudantes, pesquisadores, ativistas, intelectuais e todos os outros leitores que se relacionaram com o livro desde sua primeira publicação, em 1992, é exatamente isso o que estes textos conseguem.
356 pages, Paperback
First published May 25, 1992
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12004 people want to read
About the author
bell hooks
162 books14.2k followersbell 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.
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June 6, 2019
Another iconic bell hooks book, this one about how American pop culture marginalizes, exploits, and stereotypes Black people across literature, music, and film. I love how hooks delivers sharp insight after sharp insight about race and representation without trying to make her writing palatable to white audiences. She delves deep into how white women often appropriate Black culture, how toxic masculinity within black communities perpetuates homophobia, misogyny, and racism, the shared oppression of Native Americans and black individuals, and other pressing topics. One quote I appreciated about racial solidarity and how white people can participate in it:
“Anti-racist work that tries to get [white] individuals to see themselves as ‘victimized’ by racism in the hopes that this will act as an intervention is a misguided strategy. And indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege who are in no way victimized are capable, via their political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. Such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. It can be based on one’s political and ethical understanding of racism and one’s rejection of domination. Therefore we can see the necessity for the kind of education for critical consciousness that can enable those with power and privilege rooted in structures of domination to divest without having to see themselves as victims. Such thinking does not have to negate collective awareness that a culture of domination does seek to fundamentally distort and pervert the psyches of all citizens or that this perversion is wounding.”
hooks plows past any notion of colorblindness to interrogate why we must consider race, in particular the terror of whiteness. As someone wrote in the used copy of this book I own, for people of color, especially black people, “your color matters because it is your identity, and you must defend it and explore it.” Through her trenchant analysis of race and representation – an analysis that still applies to contemporary society though the book came out 20 years ago or so – hooks provides us a path to understand and resist how white supremacy elevates whiteness at the cost of all others. While I found hooks’ reading of the Anita Hill case to be a bit too hostile and blaming toward Hill and some of her analyses discursive, I still learned a lot from reading this collection and would recommend it to anyone who cares about social justice. I feel that this book has inspired and will continue to inspire nuanced, powerful conversations and actions about body image, race, and racism in the United States. I will end this review with another quote I loved, this one about the reality of racism even as people try to deny it:
”It is telling of our history that enables political self-recovery. In contemporary society, white and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists. This erasure, however mythic, diffuses the representation of whiteness as terror in the black imagination. It allows for assimilation and forgetfulness. The eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to the terror. It has also become a way to perpetuate the terror by providing a cover, a hiding place. Black people still feel the terror, still associate it with whiteness, but are rarely able to articulate the varied ways we are terrorized because it is easy to silence by accusations of reverse racism or by suggesting that black folks who talk about the ways we are terrorized by whites are merely evoking victimization to demand special treatment.”
“Anti-racist work that tries to get [white] individuals to see themselves as ‘victimized’ by racism in the hopes that this will act as an intervention is a misguided strategy. And indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege who are in no way victimized are capable, via their political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. Such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. It can be based on one’s political and ethical understanding of racism and one’s rejection of domination. Therefore we can see the necessity for the kind of education for critical consciousness that can enable those with power and privilege rooted in structures of domination to divest without having to see themselves as victims. Such thinking does not have to negate collective awareness that a culture of domination does seek to fundamentally distort and pervert the psyches of all citizens or that this perversion is wounding.”
hooks plows past any notion of colorblindness to interrogate why we must consider race, in particular the terror of whiteness. As someone wrote in the used copy of this book I own, for people of color, especially black people, “your color matters because it is your identity, and you must defend it and explore it.” Through her trenchant analysis of race and representation – an analysis that still applies to contemporary society though the book came out 20 years ago or so – hooks provides us a path to understand and resist how white supremacy elevates whiteness at the cost of all others. While I found hooks’ reading of the Anita Hill case to be a bit too hostile and blaming toward Hill and some of her analyses discursive, I still learned a lot from reading this collection and would recommend it to anyone who cares about social justice. I feel that this book has inspired and will continue to inspire nuanced, powerful conversations and actions about body image, race, and racism in the United States. I will end this review with another quote I loved, this one about the reality of racism even as people try to deny it:
”It is telling of our history that enables political self-recovery. In contemporary society, white and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists. This erasure, however mythic, diffuses the representation of whiteness as terror in the black imagination. It allows for assimilation and forgetfulness. The eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to the terror. It has also become a way to perpetuate the terror by providing a cover, a hiding place. Black people still feel the terror, still associate it with whiteness, but are rarely able to articulate the varied ways we are terrorized because it is easy to silence by accusations of reverse racism or by suggesting that black folks who talk about the ways we are terrorized by whites are merely evoking victimization to demand special treatment.”
June 15, 2015
This is exactly the book you should read – particularly if you live in the US, from what I’ve been reading of your police force and prison system. Now, as I said in my review of Real to Reel (that might be the other way around, of course, I haven’t checked) I don’t watch movies, especially not American movies. So a lot of this went over my head. But imagine if everytime you watched a movie, in the dark, alone, you were confronted by images of yourself as ugly, stupid, violent, wicked, sex obsessed… You know, Black American as portrayed even in films made by Black Americans. How would you feel? For White people the answer to that question seems obvious – you’d feel angry, you’d want to find the people that made this shit and hurt them. Those might seem like logical and even reasonable responses – but they aren’t the responses that normally occur to people. What if, in fact, you felt a kind of delight, a kind of joy – what if you felt pretty much exactly the same as White people feel when they watch those movies?
If you have never done this – google Clark Doll Tests. Better get some tissues ready first though.
As hooks makes abundantly clear in this book, this is but the tip of the iceberg. But what is even worse, is that this isn’t even the worst bit of the story. Let me quote the worst bit:
‘I asked the class to consider the possibility that to love blackness is dangerous in a white supremacist culture—so threatening, so serious a breach in the fabric of the social order, that death is the punishment. It became painfully obvious by the lack of response that this group of diverse students (many of them black people) were more interested in discussing the desire of black folks to be white, indeed were fixated on this issue. So much so, that they could not even take seriously a critical discussion about “loving blackness.”’ Pages 26-7
What is it to live in a culture that makes you despise your own skin? To loathe your very being and that even finds ways to make you sympathise with what is forever denied you, to make a fetish of it, to encourage you to protect and nurture and cherish what is eternally defined as ‘not you’?
The answer, for hooks, is for us to learn to love Blackness and to hate White skin in much the same way we have all been taught to hate Black skin – not as a thing, that would be too easy and simplistic, but for all that White has come to symbolise. If being White can only be of value once being Black is defined as other and devalued and repulsive – then stuff it, I don’t want to be White.
But is there any hope? We’ve been raised in this racist culture, we have had our beliefs and values and dreams structured by the world we have found ourselves enmeshed in since childhood. We didn’t choose this. Aren’t we all just ‘victims’?
Except, of course, that even asking that question means you basically know the answer – it is like saying, “Hey, I know I’m an prick, but it’s my culture, I can’t help my culture”. We are the decisions we make, the actions to take or don’t take. Once we know the consequences of white supremacy, of a system that makes children loathe their very skin, feel repelled by those who love them most, we have responsibilities to recognise that human cultures are created, sustained and reproduced by us, one action at a time and each of those actions is carried out by conscious human individuals making choices – and if our cultures have been made one action at a time, they can be remade, one kindness piled upon another.
If you have never done this – google Clark Doll Tests. Better get some tissues ready first though.
As hooks makes abundantly clear in this book, this is but the tip of the iceberg. But what is even worse, is that this isn’t even the worst bit of the story. Let me quote the worst bit:
‘I asked the class to consider the possibility that to love blackness is dangerous in a white supremacist culture—so threatening, so serious a breach in the fabric of the social order, that death is the punishment. It became painfully obvious by the lack of response that this group of diverse students (many of them black people) were more interested in discussing the desire of black folks to be white, indeed were fixated on this issue. So much so, that they could not even take seriously a critical discussion about “loving blackness.”’ Pages 26-7
What is it to live in a culture that makes you despise your own skin? To loathe your very being and that even finds ways to make you sympathise with what is forever denied you, to make a fetish of it, to encourage you to protect and nurture and cherish what is eternally defined as ‘not you’?
The answer, for hooks, is for us to learn to love Blackness and to hate White skin in much the same way we have all been taught to hate Black skin – not as a thing, that would be too easy and simplistic, but for all that White has come to symbolise. If being White can only be of value once being Black is defined as other and devalued and repulsive – then stuff it, I don’t want to be White.
But is there any hope? We’ve been raised in this racist culture, we have had our beliefs and values and dreams structured by the world we have found ourselves enmeshed in since childhood. We didn’t choose this. Aren’t we all just ‘victims’?
Except, of course, that even asking that question means you basically know the answer – it is like saying, “Hey, I know I’m an prick, but it’s my culture, I can’t help my culture”. We are the decisions we make, the actions to take or don’t take. Once we know the consequences of white supremacy, of a system that makes children loathe their very skin, feel repelled by those who love them most, we have responsibilities to recognise that human cultures are created, sustained and reproduced by us, one action at a time and each of those actions is carried out by conscious human individuals making choices – and if our cultures have been made one action at a time, they can be remade, one kindness piled upon another.
September 6, 2017
This book has given me so much food for thought and has been a great jump-off point for furthering my understanding of race theory. As a result of reading this, I have been exposed to so many authors and filmmakers that I otherwise never would have discovered. I’m so excited to read about Edmonia Lewis { known for incorporating themes relating to black people and indigenous peoples of the Americas into Neoclassical-style sculpture] and pre-Columbian African Contact with the Americas {whattttttt!??!?}.
My only criticism is that I thought Hook's analysis could be a bit essentialist at times, and I though her reading on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas scandal was WAY off. I’ve complied the best quotes below:
The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.
Cultural taboos around sexuality and desire are transgressed and made explicit as the media bombards folks with a message of difference no longer based on the white supremacist assumption that “blondes have more fun.” The “real fun” is to be had by bringing to the surface all those “nasty” unconscious fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep structure of white supremacy. In many ways it is a contemporary revival of interest in the “primitive,” with a distinctly postmodern slant.
Certainly from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the “primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.
The desire to make [sexual] contact with those bodies deemed Other, with no apparent will to dominate, assuages the guilt of the past, even takes the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection. Most importantly, it establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one’s image but to become the Other.
Masses of young people dissatisfied by U.S. imperialism, unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, afflicted by the postmodern malaise of alienation, no sense of grounding, no redemptive identity, can be manipulated by cultural strategies that offer Otherness as appeasement, particularly through commodification.
Marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation. When the dominant culture demands that the Other be offered as sign that progressive political change is taking place, that the American Dream can indeed be inclusive of difference, it invites a resurgence of essen-tialist cultural nationalism. The acknowledged Other must assume recognizable forms. Hence, it is not African American culture formed in resistance to contemporary situations that surfaces, but nostalgic evocation of a “glorious” past. And even though the focus is often on the ways that this past was “superior” to the present, this cultural narrative relies on stereotypes of the “primitive,” even as it eschews the term, to evoke a world where black people were in harmony with nature and with one another. This narrative is linked to white western conceptions of the dark Other, not to a radical questioning of those representations.
Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger. In the cultural marketplace the Other is coded as having the capacity to be more alive.
Contact between white and black which signals the absence of domination, of an oppressor/oppressed relationship, must emerge through mutual choice and negotiation. That simply by expressing their desire for “intimate” contact with black people, white people do not eradicate the politics of racial domination as they are made manifest in personal interaction.
Mutual recognition of racism, its impact both on those who are dominated and those who dominate, is the only standpoint that makes possible an encounter between races that is not based on denial and fantasy. For it is the ever present reality of racist domination, of white supremacy, that renders problematic the desire of white people to have contact with the Other. Often it is this reality that is most masked when representations of contact between white and non-white, white and black, appear in mass culture.
Black nationalism, with its emphasis on black separatism, is resurging as a response to the assumption that white cultural imperialism and white yearning to possess the Other are invading black life, appropriating and violating black culture. As a survival strategy, black nationalism surfaces most strongly when white cultural appropriation of black culture threatens to decontextualize and thereby erase knowledge of the specific historical and social context of black experience from which cultural productions and distinct black styles emerge. Yet most white intellectuals writing critically about black culture do not see these constructive dimensions of black nationalism and tend to see it instead as naive essentialism, rooted in notions of ethnic purity that resemble white racist assumptions.
The commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization.
Resurgence of black nationalism as an expression of black people’s desire to guard against white cultural appropriation indicates the extent to which the commodification of blackness (including the nationalist agenda) has been reinscribed and marketed with an atavistic narrative, a fantasy of Otherness that reduces protest to spectacle and stimulates even greater longing for the “primitive.” Given this cultural context, black nationalism is more a gesture of powerlessness than a sign of critical resistance. Who can take seriously Public Enemy’s insistence that the dominated and their allies “fight the power” when that declaration is in no way linked to a collective organized struggle.
When young black people mouth 1960s’ black nationalist rhetoric, don Kente cloth, gold medallions, dread their hair, and diss the white folks they hang out with, they expose the way meaningless commodification strips these signs of political integrity and meaning, denying the possibility that they can serve as a catalyst for concrete political action. As signs, their power to ignite critical consciousness is diffused when they are commodified. Communities of resistance are replaced by communities of consumption.
And even though a product like rap articulates narratives of coming to critical political consciousness, it also exploits stereotypes and essentialist notions of blackness (like black people have natural rhythm and are more sexual).
In her introduction to The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry states that “there is ordinarily no language for pain,” that “physical pain is difficult to express; and that this inexpressibility has political consequences.” This is certainly true of black male pain. Black males are unable to fully articulate and acknowledge the pain in their lives. They do not have a public discourse or audience within racist society that enables them to give their pain a hearing. Sadly, black men often evoke racist rhetoric that identifies the black male as animal, speaking of themselves as “endangered species,” as “primitive,” in their bid to gain recognition of their suffering.
When young black men acquire a powerful public voice and presence via cultural production, as has happened with the explosion of rap music, it does not mean that they have a vehicle that will enable them to articulate that pain. Providing narratives that are mainly about power and pleasure, that advocate resistance to racism yet support phallocentrism, rap denies this pain. True, it was conditions of suffering and survival, of poverty, deprivation, and lack that characterized the marginal locations from which breakdancing and rap emerged.
L isten to my story, about myself, life, and romance.” Rap music provides a public voice for young black men who are usually silenced and overlooked. It emerged in the streets—outside the confines of a domesticity shaped and informed by poverty, outside enclosed spaces where young males body had to be contained and controlled.
Male creativity, expressed in rap and dancing, required wide-open spaces, symbolic frontiers where the body could do its thing, expand, grow, and move, surrounded by a watching crowd. Domestic space, equated with repression and containment, as well as with the “feminine” was resisted and rejected so that an assertive patriarchal paradigm of competitive masculinity and its concomitant emphasis on physical prowess could emerge. As a result, much rap music is riddled with sexism and misogyny. The public story of black male lives narrated by rap music speaks directly to and against white racist domination, but only indirectly hints at the enormity of black male pain. Constructing the black male body as site of pleasure and power, rap and the dances associated with it suggest vibrancy, intensity, and an unsurpassed joy in living. It may very well be that living on the edge, so close to the possibility of being “exterminated” (which is how many young black males feel) heightens one’s ability to risk and make one’s pleasure more intense.
Evocations of an “essentialist” notion of black identity seek to deny the extent to which all black folk must engage with whites as well as exclude individuals from “blackness” whose perspectives, values, or lifestyles may differ from a totalizing notion of black experience that sees only those folk who live in segregated communities or have little contact with whites as “authentically” black.
The lives of Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Lucy Parson, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Angela Davis, Bernice Reagon, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and coundess others bear witness to the difficulty of developing radical black female subjectivity even as they attest to the joy and triumph of living with a decolonized mind and participating in ongoing resistance struggle.
While it may not have changed the outcome of the hearings in any way, had Hill been more strategic and passionate, and dare I say it, even angry at the assault on her character, it would have made the hearings less an assault on the psyches of black females watching and on women viewers in general.
While this may be true, it should not lead to uncritical acceptance of Hill’s or any woman’s allegiance to white supremacist patriarchy. Advocates of feminism should be among those adamantly stressing that Hill had other options and did not have to act only in the role of dutiful daughter. Perhaps, it is her allegiance to that role that not only made her reluctant to speak in the first place but finally unable to speak in a manner that would make her case convincing. Unable to step outside the boundaries of patriarchal discourse, Hill was never disloyal to patriarchy or, for that matter, to the institution of white supremacy. Instead she expressed her loyalty consistently by the manner in which she appealed to the system for justice. By appropriating her as feminist hero, women, and white women in particular, show that they are more interested in positioning Hill in support of a feminism that she never espoused.
Given this aspiration and the ongoing brute physical labor of black men that was the backbone of slave economy (there were more male slaves than black female slaves, particularly before breeding became a common practice), it is really amazing that stereotypes of black men as lazy and shiftless so quickly became common in public imagination. In these 19th and early 20th-century representations, black men were cartoon-like creatures only interested in drinking and having a good time. Such stereotypes were an effective way for white racists to erase the significance of black male labor from public consciousness. Later on, these same stereotypes were evoked as reasons to deny black men jobs. They are still evoked today.
Douglass were patriarchs, but as benevolent dictators they were willing to share power with women, especially if it meant they did not have to surrender any male privilege. As co-editors of the North Star; Douglass and Delaney had a masthead in 1847 which read “right is of no sex—truth is of no color...” The 1848 meeting of the National Negro Convention included a proposal by Delaney stating: “Whereas we fully believe in the equality of the sexes, therefore, resolved that we hereby invite females hereafter to take part in our deliberation.” In Delaney’s 1852 treatise The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, he argued that black women should have full access to education so that they could be better mothers, asserting:
The potency and respectability of a nation or people, depends entirely upon the position of their women; therefore, it is essential to our elevation that the female portion of our children be instructed in all the arts and sciences pertaining to the highest civilization.
In Delaney’s mind, equal rights for black women in certain public spheres such as education did not mean that he was advocating a change in domestic relations whereby black men and women would have co-equal status in the home.
With the emergence of a fierce phallocentrism, a man was no longer a man because he provided care for his family, he was a man simply because he had a penis. Furthermore, his ability to use that penis in the arena of sexual conquest could bring him as much status as being a wage earner and provider. A sexually defined masculine ideal rooted in physical domination and sexual possession of women could be accessible to all men. Hence, even unemployed black men could gain status, could be seen as the embodiment of masculinity, within a phallocentric framework.
On the terms set by white supremacist patriarchy, black men can name their pain only by talking about themselves in crude ways that reinscribe them in a context of primitivism.
nobody wants to know my name, or hear my voice. In prison, I’m just a number; in the army, I’m just a rank; on the job and in the hospital, I’m just a statistic; on the street, I’m just a suspect. My head reels. If I didn’t have access to print, I, too, would write on walls. I want my life’s passage to be acknowledged for at least the length of time it takes pain to fade from brick. With that said I serve my notice: I have no cheek to turn.
When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority. The “gaze” has always been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one’s gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, “Look at me when I talk to you.” Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking.
Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slaveowners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves.
Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.
When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation. It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing independent black cinema.
Given the real life public circumstances wherein black men were murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other, the private realm of television screens or dark theaters could unleash the repressed gaze. There they could “look” at white womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze, interpreting, and punishing. That white supremacist structure that had murdered Emmet Till after interpreting his look as violation, as “rape” of white womanhood, could not control black male responses to screen images.
With the possible exception of early race movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the “body” of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is “white.” (Recent movies do not conform to this paradigm but I am turning to the past with the intent to chart the development of black female spectatorship.)
...the acts of analysis, of deconstruction and of reading “against the grain” offer an additional pleasure—the pleasure of resistance, of saying “no”: not to “unsophisticated” enjoyment, by ourselves and others, of culturally dominant images, but to the structures of power which ask us to consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed ways.
It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom femininity is the trapping of oppression, but it is also a kind of play, a toying with that which is taboo...What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports...But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine…
Dorian Carey urges all of us to break through denial, through the longing for an illusory star identity, so that we can confront and accept ourselves as we really are—only then can fantasy, ritual, be a site of seduction, passion, and play where the self is truly recognized, loved, and never abandoned or betrayed.
**many more but out of characters.
My only criticism is that I thought Hook's analysis could be a bit essentialist at times, and I though her reading on the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas scandal was WAY off. I’ve complied the best quotes below:
The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.
Cultural taboos around sexuality and desire are transgressed and made explicit as the media bombards folks with a message of difference no longer based on the white supremacist assumption that “blondes have more fun.” The “real fun” is to be had by bringing to the surface all those “nasty” unconscious fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep structure of white supremacy. In many ways it is a contemporary revival of interest in the “primitive,” with a distinctly postmodern slant.
Certainly from the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the hope is that desires for the “primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.
The desire to make [sexual] contact with those bodies deemed Other, with no apparent will to dominate, assuages the guilt of the past, even takes the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection. Most importantly, it establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures of domination on those designated Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one’s image but to become the Other.
Masses of young people dissatisfied by U.S. imperialism, unemployment, lack of economic opportunity, afflicted by the postmodern malaise of alienation, no sense of grounding, no redemptive identity, can be manipulated by cultural strategies that offer Otherness as appeasement, particularly through commodification.
Marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation. When the dominant culture demands that the Other be offered as sign that progressive political change is taking place, that the American Dream can indeed be inclusive of difference, it invites a resurgence of essen-tialist cultural nationalism. The acknowledged Other must assume recognizable forms. Hence, it is not African American culture formed in resistance to contemporary situations that surfaces, but nostalgic evocation of a “glorious” past. And even though the focus is often on the ways that this past was “superior” to the present, this cultural narrative relies on stereotypes of the “primitive,” even as it eschews the term, to evoke a world where black people were in harmony with nature and with one another. This narrative is linked to white western conceptions of the dark Other, not to a radical questioning of those representations.
Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger. In the cultural marketplace the Other is coded as having the capacity to be more alive.
Contact between white and black which signals the absence of domination, of an oppressor/oppressed relationship, must emerge through mutual choice and negotiation. That simply by expressing their desire for “intimate” contact with black people, white people do not eradicate the politics of racial domination as they are made manifest in personal interaction.
Mutual recognition of racism, its impact both on those who are dominated and those who dominate, is the only standpoint that makes possible an encounter between races that is not based on denial and fantasy. For it is the ever present reality of racist domination, of white supremacy, that renders problematic the desire of white people to have contact with the Other. Often it is this reality that is most masked when representations of contact between white and non-white, white and black, appear in mass culture.
Black nationalism, with its emphasis on black separatism, is resurging as a response to the assumption that white cultural imperialism and white yearning to possess the Other are invading black life, appropriating and violating black culture. As a survival strategy, black nationalism surfaces most strongly when white cultural appropriation of black culture threatens to decontextualize and thereby erase knowledge of the specific historical and social context of black experience from which cultural productions and distinct black styles emerge. Yet most white intellectuals writing critically about black culture do not see these constructive dimensions of black nationalism and tend to see it instead as naive essentialism, rooted in notions of ethnic purity that resemble white racist assumptions.
The commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated, via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a process of decontextualization.
Resurgence of black nationalism as an expression of black people’s desire to guard against white cultural appropriation indicates the extent to which the commodification of blackness (including the nationalist agenda) has been reinscribed and marketed with an atavistic narrative, a fantasy of Otherness that reduces protest to spectacle and stimulates even greater longing for the “primitive.” Given this cultural context, black nationalism is more a gesture of powerlessness than a sign of critical resistance. Who can take seriously Public Enemy’s insistence that the dominated and their allies “fight the power” when that declaration is in no way linked to a collective organized struggle.
When young black people mouth 1960s’ black nationalist rhetoric, don Kente cloth, gold medallions, dread their hair, and diss the white folks they hang out with, they expose the way meaningless commodification strips these signs of political integrity and meaning, denying the possibility that they can serve as a catalyst for concrete political action. As signs, their power to ignite critical consciousness is diffused when they are commodified. Communities of resistance are replaced by communities of consumption.
And even though a product like rap articulates narratives of coming to critical political consciousness, it also exploits stereotypes and essentialist notions of blackness (like black people have natural rhythm and are more sexual).
In her introduction to The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry states that “there is ordinarily no language for pain,” that “physical pain is difficult to express; and that this inexpressibility has political consequences.” This is certainly true of black male pain. Black males are unable to fully articulate and acknowledge the pain in their lives. They do not have a public discourse or audience within racist society that enables them to give their pain a hearing. Sadly, black men often evoke racist rhetoric that identifies the black male as animal, speaking of themselves as “endangered species,” as “primitive,” in their bid to gain recognition of their suffering.
When young black men acquire a powerful public voice and presence via cultural production, as has happened with the explosion of rap music, it does not mean that they have a vehicle that will enable them to articulate that pain. Providing narratives that are mainly about power and pleasure, that advocate resistance to racism yet support phallocentrism, rap denies this pain. True, it was conditions of suffering and survival, of poverty, deprivation, and lack that characterized the marginal locations from which breakdancing and rap emerged.
L isten to my story, about myself, life, and romance.” Rap music provides a public voice for young black men who are usually silenced and overlooked. It emerged in the streets—outside the confines of a domesticity shaped and informed by poverty, outside enclosed spaces where young males body had to be contained and controlled.
Male creativity, expressed in rap and dancing, required wide-open spaces, symbolic frontiers where the body could do its thing, expand, grow, and move, surrounded by a watching crowd. Domestic space, equated with repression and containment, as well as with the “feminine” was resisted and rejected so that an assertive patriarchal paradigm of competitive masculinity and its concomitant emphasis on physical prowess could emerge. As a result, much rap music is riddled with sexism and misogyny. The public story of black male lives narrated by rap music speaks directly to and against white racist domination, but only indirectly hints at the enormity of black male pain. Constructing the black male body as site of pleasure and power, rap and the dances associated with it suggest vibrancy, intensity, and an unsurpassed joy in living. It may very well be that living on the edge, so close to the possibility of being “exterminated” (which is how many young black males feel) heightens one’s ability to risk and make one’s pleasure more intense.
Evocations of an “essentialist” notion of black identity seek to deny the extent to which all black folk must engage with whites as well as exclude individuals from “blackness” whose perspectives, values, or lifestyles may differ from a totalizing notion of black experience that sees only those folk who live in segregated communities or have little contact with whites as “authentically” black.
The lives of Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Lucy Parson, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Angela Davis, Bernice Reagon, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and coundess others bear witness to the difficulty of developing radical black female subjectivity even as they attest to the joy and triumph of living with a decolonized mind and participating in ongoing resistance struggle.
While it may not have changed the outcome of the hearings in any way, had Hill been more strategic and passionate, and dare I say it, even angry at the assault on her character, it would have made the hearings less an assault on the psyches of black females watching and on women viewers in general.
While this may be true, it should not lead to uncritical acceptance of Hill’s or any woman’s allegiance to white supremacist patriarchy. Advocates of feminism should be among those adamantly stressing that Hill had other options and did not have to act only in the role of dutiful daughter. Perhaps, it is her allegiance to that role that not only made her reluctant to speak in the first place but finally unable to speak in a manner that would make her case convincing. Unable to step outside the boundaries of patriarchal discourse, Hill was never disloyal to patriarchy or, for that matter, to the institution of white supremacy. Instead she expressed her loyalty consistently by the manner in which she appealed to the system for justice. By appropriating her as feminist hero, women, and white women in particular, show that they are more interested in positioning Hill in support of a feminism that she never espoused.
Given this aspiration and the ongoing brute physical labor of black men that was the backbone of slave economy (there were more male slaves than black female slaves, particularly before breeding became a common practice), it is really amazing that stereotypes of black men as lazy and shiftless so quickly became common in public imagination. In these 19th and early 20th-century representations, black men were cartoon-like creatures only interested in drinking and having a good time. Such stereotypes were an effective way for white racists to erase the significance of black male labor from public consciousness. Later on, these same stereotypes were evoked as reasons to deny black men jobs. They are still evoked today.
Douglass were patriarchs, but as benevolent dictators they were willing to share power with women, especially if it meant they did not have to surrender any male privilege. As co-editors of the North Star; Douglass and Delaney had a masthead in 1847 which read “right is of no sex—truth is of no color...” The 1848 meeting of the National Negro Convention included a proposal by Delaney stating: “Whereas we fully believe in the equality of the sexes, therefore, resolved that we hereby invite females hereafter to take part in our deliberation.” In Delaney’s 1852 treatise The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, he argued that black women should have full access to education so that they could be better mothers, asserting:
The potency and respectability of a nation or people, depends entirely upon the position of their women; therefore, it is essential to our elevation that the female portion of our children be instructed in all the arts and sciences pertaining to the highest civilization.
In Delaney’s mind, equal rights for black women in certain public spheres such as education did not mean that he was advocating a change in domestic relations whereby black men and women would have co-equal status in the home.
With the emergence of a fierce phallocentrism, a man was no longer a man because he provided care for his family, he was a man simply because he had a penis. Furthermore, his ability to use that penis in the arena of sexual conquest could bring him as much status as being a wage earner and provider. A sexually defined masculine ideal rooted in physical domination and sexual possession of women could be accessible to all men. Hence, even unemployed black men could gain status, could be seen as the embodiment of masculinity, within a phallocentric framework.
On the terms set by white supremacist patriarchy, black men can name their pain only by talking about themselves in crude ways that reinscribe them in a context of primitivism.
nobody wants to know my name, or hear my voice. In prison, I’m just a number; in the army, I’m just a rank; on the job and in the hospital, I’m just a statistic; on the street, I’m just a suspect. My head reels. If I didn’t have access to print, I, too, would write on walls. I want my life’s passage to be acknowledged for at least the length of time it takes pain to fade from brick. With that said I serve my notice: I have no cheek to turn.
When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, challenges to authority. The “gaze” has always been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punishments that one’s gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, “Look at me when I talk to you.” Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking.
Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slaveowners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves.
Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.
When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation. It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing independent black cinema.
Given the real life public circumstances wherein black men were murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other, the private realm of television screens or dark theaters could unleash the repressed gaze. There they could “look” at white womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze, interpreting, and punishing. That white supremacist structure that had murdered Emmet Till after interpreting his look as violation, as “rape” of white womanhood, could not control black male responses to screen images.
With the possible exception of early race movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the “body” of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is “white.” (Recent movies do not conform to this paradigm but I am turning to the past with the intent to chart the development of black female spectatorship.)
...the acts of analysis, of deconstruction and of reading “against the grain” offer an additional pleasure—the pleasure of resistance, of saying “no”: not to “unsophisticated” enjoyment, by ourselves and others, of culturally dominant images, but to the structures of power which ask us to consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed ways.
It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom femininity is the trapping of oppression, but it is also a kind of play, a toying with that which is taboo...What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports...But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine…
Dorian Carey urges all of us to break through denial, through the longing for an illusory star identity, so that we can confront and accept ourselves as we really are—only then can fantasy, ritual, be a site of seduction, passion, and play where the self is truly recognized, loved, and never abandoned or betrayed.
**many more but out of characters.
December 7, 2010
bell hooks is amazing. I think I would have liked this book more if I got more of its pop culture references. It was written almost twenty years ago, so I haven't seen some of the movies, commercials, books, etc. it discusses. However, hooks' critiques and insights are incisive and profound. She breaks down racist and sexist messages in media and talks about Black and female self-hatred as tools of oppression. She turns the image of Madonna as a rebellious revolutionary on its head, arguing that Madonna exploits and appropriates Black culture in her art to make herself seem more radical. Another article discusses the "oppositional Black female gaze" as a courageous act of rebellion for colonized people who have been taught not to stare or look power in the eye. In other chapters, she analyzes the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill trials, the construction of Black masculinity in media, and "representations of whiteness in the black imagination." This book definitely made me think about representations of race and gender in media messages. I think I need to re-read it when I'm not on the train, because I found myself having difficulty focusing on the dense academic language in that setting. Nonetheless, it made me want to pick up more of hooks' books.
April 14, 2017
Black Looks: Race and Representation is a collection of 12 essays by Bell Hooks looking at a range of issues including black sexuality, masculinity, commodification of black culture and black history, arising from representations of people of colour in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
As a feminist, I think it is of vital importance to be aware of race issues and the way that women of colour have been silenced and marginalized by the movement. Its particularly important to me as a white woman to listen and broaden my knowledge of race and feminism, to read amazing writers such as Bell Hooks and absorb what they have to say about important criticisms about racial representation and this white patriarchy we are raised in. Despite its being written in the 90s I found Black Looks extremely interesting and relevant, not to mention educational and certainly enlightening. I didn't need to agree with everything she said to get something of great value from the essays, and although it is American-centric, I can see the parallels with the treatment and representation of minority and indigenous people in my own country (New Zealand)
Some of the essays stood out for me more than others.Loving Blackness as Political Resistance looked at the ways that blackness is represented negatively in contrast to whiteness and its effects on black people, as well as 'loving blackness' as a form of resistance. I especially found Eating the Other and Selling Hot Pussy as incredibly relevant, as they deal with commodification of black culture, appropriation and fetishization , and with black sexuality as seen by whites but also the ways black women see themselves and are treated my men in their own culture. Bell hooks looks at the way white supremacist society misrepresents blackness as well as abusing it and marginalizing black people, but also the way people have internalized racism and racist ideas about themselves, as well as internalized sexism. The look at black male masculinity, the ways white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has changed and effected it and the way some black men have internalized its messages to mistreat their black sisters in Reconstructing Black Masculinity was really eye opening and interesting. The essay on Madonna was quite interesting in light of the racist and sexist things Madonna has subsequently done since the books publication (such as saying black men are the most sexist shes ever met). One thing that stayed with me was the absolute need for both white men and women and black men and women to decolonize their minds, thoughts and ideals, for white people to be ever aware of their privilege and to listen to and support our brothers and sisters in their struggle against a system of interlocking oppression. I love the name hooks uses to articulate this system; white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which is a system which oppresses people based on their race, their class, and their gender, and is thus detrimental to everyone, and in everyones interest to dismantle and fight. I think feminism as a movement is doing much better now to address intersectional oppression, but its sad seeing how much the voices of people of colour , especially black women, have been and continue to be ignored and marginalized. Its up to white men and women to help strengthen that voice, and object to detrimental and stereotyped representations whilst promoting platforms for people of colour. We also need to shut up and listen, and learn about alternative ways of being and thinking from people of colour.
One of the lines in Representing Whiteness struck me as really important and relevant
"Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity(we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional attachment in the myth of "sameness" , even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think."
The 'I don't see colour' bullshit I hear white people pull out gets seriously infuriating and is way too common.
Another thing that stayed with me is the reiteration that its really hard for white people to understand the psychological terror and trauma that historical oppression and genocide continue to have on people of colour, especially as they struggle with ongoing racism and oppression. This is brought up in the final essay Revolutionary Renegades which I found to be one of the most interesting. It perfectly demonstrates the active attempt to suppress parts of history, as is done with historical womens contributions, specifically the historic solidarity and kinship between Native Americans and Africans/African Americans.
"Contrary to colonial white imperialist insistence that it was'natural' for groups who are different to engage in conflict and power struggle, the first meetings of Africans and Native Americans offer a counter-perspective , a vision of cross-cultural contact where reciprocity and recognition of the primacy of the culture are affirmed, where the will to conquer and dominate was not seen as the only way to confront the Other who is not ourselves."
I'll leave this review with some insight and advice that I myself and white people need to remember
"Understanding how racism works,he can see the way in which whiteness acts to terrorize without seeing himself as bad, or all white people as bad, and all black people as good. Repudiating us-and-them dichotomies does not mean that we should never speak of the ways observing the world from the standpoint of ' whiteness' may indeed distort perception, impede understanding of the way racism works both in the larger world as well as in the world of our intimate interactions. "
As a feminist, I think it is of vital importance to be aware of race issues and the way that women of colour have been silenced and marginalized by the movement. Its particularly important to me as a white woman to listen and broaden my knowledge of race and feminism, to read amazing writers such as Bell Hooks and absorb what they have to say about important criticisms about racial representation and this white patriarchy we are raised in. Despite its being written in the 90s I found Black Looks extremely interesting and relevant, not to mention educational and certainly enlightening. I didn't need to agree with everything she said to get something of great value from the essays, and although it is American-centric, I can see the parallels with the treatment and representation of minority and indigenous people in my own country (New Zealand)
Some of the essays stood out for me more than others.Loving Blackness as Political Resistance looked at the ways that blackness is represented negatively in contrast to whiteness and its effects on black people, as well as 'loving blackness' as a form of resistance. I especially found Eating the Other and Selling Hot Pussy as incredibly relevant, as they deal with commodification of black culture, appropriation and fetishization , and with black sexuality as seen by whites but also the ways black women see themselves and are treated my men in their own culture. Bell hooks looks at the way white supremacist society misrepresents blackness as well as abusing it and marginalizing black people, but also the way people have internalized racism and racist ideas about themselves, as well as internalized sexism. The look at black male masculinity, the ways white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has changed and effected it and the way some black men have internalized its messages to mistreat their black sisters in Reconstructing Black Masculinity was really eye opening and interesting. The essay on Madonna was quite interesting in light of the racist and sexist things Madonna has subsequently done since the books publication (such as saying black men are the most sexist shes ever met). One thing that stayed with me was the absolute need for both white men and women and black men and women to decolonize their minds, thoughts and ideals, for white people to be ever aware of their privilege and to listen to and support our brothers and sisters in their struggle against a system of interlocking oppression. I love the name hooks uses to articulate this system; white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which is a system which oppresses people based on their race, their class, and their gender, and is thus detrimental to everyone, and in everyones interest to dismantle and fight. I think feminism as a movement is doing much better now to address intersectional oppression, but its sad seeing how much the voices of people of colour , especially black women, have been and continue to be ignored and marginalized. Its up to white men and women to help strengthen that voice, and object to detrimental and stereotyped representations whilst promoting platforms for people of colour. We also need to shut up and listen, and learn about alternative ways of being and thinking from people of colour.
One of the lines in Representing Whiteness struck me as really important and relevant
"Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity(we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional attachment in the myth of "sameness" , even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think."
The 'I don't see colour' bullshit I hear white people pull out gets seriously infuriating and is way too common.
Another thing that stayed with me is the reiteration that its really hard for white people to understand the psychological terror and trauma that historical oppression and genocide continue to have on people of colour, especially as they struggle with ongoing racism and oppression. This is brought up in the final essay Revolutionary Renegades which I found to be one of the most interesting. It perfectly demonstrates the active attempt to suppress parts of history, as is done with historical womens contributions, specifically the historic solidarity and kinship between Native Americans and Africans/African Americans.
"Contrary to colonial white imperialist insistence that it was'natural' for groups who are different to engage in conflict and power struggle, the first meetings of Africans and Native Americans offer a counter-perspective , a vision of cross-cultural contact where reciprocity and recognition of the primacy of the culture are affirmed, where the will to conquer and dominate was not seen as the only way to confront the Other who is not ourselves."
I'll leave this review with some insight and advice that I myself and white people need to remember
"Understanding how racism works,he can see the way in which whiteness acts to terrorize without seeing himself as bad, or all white people as bad, and all black people as good. Repudiating us-and-them dichotomies does not mean that we should never speak of the ways observing the world from the standpoint of ' whiteness' may indeed distort perception, impede understanding of the way racism works both in the larger world as well as in the world of our intimate interactions. "
February 9, 2017
I owe bell hooks. I have owed bell hooks ever since my encounter with her writing in my final year in university, wherein we analyzed the importance of intersectionality and the potential problems of white feminism and how it has a tendency to be a form of cultural imperialism with the guise of 'equality'. In other words, I have loved bell hooks ever since her words empowered me as a PoC feminist.
Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell hooks contains 12 essays that centralize its focus and analysis on blackness and representation of blackness in the media. As an intersectional feminist, I think it is necessary praxis to listen, understand and broaden one's awareness of a range of issues that affect different people of colour so that we can be good allies. And though this book is predominantly about blackness, the sentiment and Black Looks is accessible, educational and still relevant today, even though it was written in 1992.
Something that particularly stood out for me was hook's observation that solidarity is often formed via shared pain - that we can develop connections with others through our experiences of pain, namely self-hatred, overt prejudice and issues of identity. However, hooks argues that it is equally important - or more important - that we, as people of colour, should also construct language that is positive, and about loving and affirming what makes us different in the realm of white supremacy.
Though critical consciousness is necessary, and it can be painful to confront and change our internalized racism and self-hatred, hooks asserts that self-affirmation, supporting one another and recognition that our experiences are not monolithic are important in resisting oppressive systems that privilege and favour whiteness. This particular point served as an important reminder for me to not only bring awareness and arouse consciousness in those around me, but to also actively support and affirm my PoC peers and encourage self-love.
To construct language that affirms our identities, to encourage self-love and acceptance in our ourselves and each other is so important, especially when most of us who grow up surrounded with images that elevate and celebrate whiteness and diminishes or reinforce stereotypes of non-whiteness will feel pain, confusion and alienation. Supporting each other, our brothers and sisters, is something vital to bridge those gaps of alienation and to heal those wounds.
hooks also talks a lot about representation of blackness in the media, and how sexism intersects with racism in such portrayals. She also shares her experiences with her discussions with other people of colour, especially black women, and also the white people she taught in her classes. A particular statement she makes, which I deeply agree with, asserts:
Too often have I heard people make calls to forget about history, that the past is the past, and to 'move on' from the past -- never mind that the effects of the past, of history, of memories of violence enacted on people of colour, remain; still hurting us, and the very violence people abhor and discourage happen today. From that, bell hooks offers an important discussion on the importance of memory, solidarity and resisting erasure.
To those who are not black and do not know the struggles of blackness (and may struggle with this book), it is especially important for us to read, listen, absorb and understand. I took much from this book. I encourage people to read this book if they want to gain insight on perspectives and approaches on blackness, gender and sex, media and identity.
Rating: 4/5
-
Review can also be found on my book blog, Read, Think, Ponder!
Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell hooks contains 12 essays that centralize its focus and analysis on blackness and representation of blackness in the media. As an intersectional feminist, I think it is necessary praxis to listen, understand and broaden one's awareness of a range of issues that affect different people of colour so that we can be good allies. And though this book is predominantly about blackness, the sentiment and Black Looks is accessible, educational and still relevant today, even though it was written in 1992.
Something that particularly stood out for me was hook's observation that solidarity is often formed via shared pain - that we can develop connections with others through our experiences of pain, namely self-hatred, overt prejudice and issues of identity. However, hooks argues that it is equally important - or more important - that we, as people of colour, should also construct language that is positive, and about loving and affirming what makes us different in the realm of white supremacy.
Though critical consciousness is necessary, and it can be painful to confront and change our internalized racism and self-hatred, hooks asserts that self-affirmation, supporting one another and recognition that our experiences are not monolithic are important in resisting oppressive systems that privilege and favour whiteness. This particular point served as an important reminder for me to not only bring awareness and arouse consciousness in those around me, but to also actively support and affirm my PoC peers and encourage self-love.
To construct language that affirms our identities, to encourage self-love and acceptance in our ourselves and each other is so important, especially when most of us who grow up surrounded with images that elevate and celebrate whiteness and diminishes or reinforce stereotypes of non-whiteness will feel pain, confusion and alienation. Supporting each other, our brothers and sisters, is something vital to bridge those gaps of alienation and to heal those wounds.
hooks also talks a lot about representation of blackness in the media, and how sexism intersects with racism in such portrayals. She also shares her experiences with her discussions with other people of colour, especially black women, and also the white people she taught in her classes. A particular statement she makes, which I deeply agree with, asserts:
Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, forgetfulness is encouraged.
Too often have I heard people make calls to forget about history, that the past is the past, and to 'move on' from the past -- never mind that the effects of the past, of history, of memories of violence enacted on people of colour, remain; still hurting us, and the very violence people abhor and discourage happen today. From that, bell hooks offers an important discussion on the importance of memory, solidarity and resisting erasure.
To those who are not black and do not know the struggles of blackness (and may struggle with this book), it is especially important for us to read, listen, absorb and understand. I took much from this book. I encourage people to read this book if they want to gain insight on perspectives and approaches on blackness, gender and sex, media and identity.
Rating: 4/5
-
Review can also be found on my book blog, Read, Think, Ponder!
November 21, 2019
I read this book as part of a critical theory and postcolonial module in my third year at university and fell in love with Hooks. She is honest, bright and unashamed of her desire to love, to be positive in light of degeneracy, to highlight evident and underlying injustice in our current Western-centric vision of politics. She is a power woman. Changed me perspective on many things, an eye opening read.
October 17, 2024
✨another big brain book by queen bell✨
November 27, 2015
bell hooks remains one of the most underrated and overlooked scholars of our time. In the eight years that I have been in academia, I have only been assigned her readings twice! And that is not for a lack gender and critical race studies courses that I have taken during that time period. Black Looks: Race and Representation picks up where Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider left off. With Black Looks, hooks is once again probing the difficult position of examining difference within the framework of Blackness. Her position is unique because she uses her standpoint of being brought up in a loving Black community then entering a hostile white community that is academia. She examines and challenges the dominant images/narrative that white individuals produce on Black lives that continue to frame Black existence as either a negative or depressing one. In the first essay, "Loving Blackness as Political Resistance," hooks argues that to love Blackness goes against hegemonic controlling ideology that privileges whiteness. Not only that, but to love Blackness is radical because even when Black lives are framed by allies or the media the framework is one of discussing one's sadness or self-hatred of being Black, and thus to love Blackness is to resist that framework.
Additionally, although the book was written over twenty years ago, it remains as timely as ever. With recent Black students holding universities accountable for institutional racism, hooks' essay "Eating the Other" addresses university racism through the sexual politics that exist on campus. It's worth a read because now, because while it is easy to hold a "larger" organization accountable it is difficult to challenge the ways in which students or allies perpetrate harmful racist and sexist acts as well. Lastly, Black Looks holds my favorite essay of all time, which is "Selling Hot Pussy." In this essay, hooks argues for radical sexual politics as means to disrupt sexist images in society. It's worth a read for the title alone.
Additionally, although the book was written over twenty years ago, it remains as timely as ever. With recent Black students holding universities accountable for institutional racism, hooks' essay "Eating the Other" addresses university racism through the sexual politics that exist on campus. It's worth a read because now, because while it is easy to hold a "larger" organization accountable it is difficult to challenge the ways in which students or allies perpetrate harmful racist and sexist acts as well. Lastly, Black Looks holds my favorite essay of all time, which is "Selling Hot Pussy." In this essay, hooks argues for radical sexual politics as means to disrupt sexist images in society. It's worth a read for the title alone.
September 30, 2019
While so much of hooks’s writing is thoughtful, eye-opening, and engaging, I am truly disappointed by the latter half of the book and her espousal of Afrocentric hyperdiffusionism. For all her intelligence and insight regarding philosophy and literature, it’s a crushing let-down for the book to end on a conspiracy theory that she defends with a strawman; appropriation of Native American sociopolitical struggle; and a conspicuously biased perspective of history. The first half of her book deserved an ending so much better than this (though the essay about Paris is Burning did raise my eyebrows).
I suppose there is nothing untainted and everything is corrupt. For all the promise bell hooks’s book initially contains, it can only exist inside the limitations of its time (1992) and its author. I would love to know what she thinks about this material now, in 2019, after everything that has happened and if she has any regrets from her recent life that might play into an evolution of thought regarding the problematic aspects of her work.
Ah well.
I suppose there is nothing untainted and everything is corrupt. For all the promise bell hooks’s book initially contains, it can only exist inside the limitations of its time (1992) and its author. I would love to know what she thinks about this material now, in 2019, after everything that has happened and if she has any regrets from her recent life that might play into an evolution of thought regarding the problematic aspects of her work.
Ah well.
September 17, 2007
bell hooks' most academic work, Black Looks, is also my favorite, although not necessarily because it is academic. In my favorite essay, Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, hooks writes, "Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture." The essay continues with more assertions, such as these, which I think easily extend to white members of radical communities. Also, extremely informative, Revolutionary "Renegades": Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians details some past accounts of solidarity and opposition among people indigenous to this continent and African Americans, including harmonious pre-Columbus meetings.
Want to read
June 24, 2016* 10 Unapologetic Books About Race in America
In this collection of essays, feminist icon and activist Bell Hooks examines the African American experience on topics ranging from black femininity to the commodification of black culture and history in popular narratives displayed in literature, fashion, popular culture, and more. She focuses on spectatorship and draws on personal experience in developing new ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness.
In this collection of essays, feminist icon and activist Bell Hooks examines the African American experience on topics ranging from black femininity to the commodification of black culture and history in popular narratives displayed in literature, fashion, popular culture, and more. She focuses on spectatorship and draws on personal experience in developing new ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness.
July 15, 2018
The highest praise I can give this book (and also the saddest commentary on its subject matter) is that this is just as relevant in 2018 as it was when it was published in 1992.
August 14, 2021
It's hard for me to critique bell hook's work because she places such a huge emphasis on reminding the reader of the American norm of the white supremacist patriarchal perspective, the privileged experience I have. All of her essays challenge my default understanding of how this world works, which is why I absolutely love reading her. This collection of essays covers ground I haven't considered before with the exception of Paris Is Burning.
I now understand how that movie is upsetting. The participants in the Balls, by and large black queer people, have nothing because they're living deep in a white supremacist patriarchal sphere, and within their largely black queer bubble have created a competition wherein they reward each other for excellence in achieving "beauty" as defined by the white supremacist patriarchal perspective. Participants in the Balls are intimately aware of the impossibility of achieving the kinds of material wealth, luxury and comfort they are convinced is the goal, convinced by the white supremacist patriarchal storytelling of popular culture, history, marketing and the beauty industry. I now see this very clearly, and it is as upsetting as bell hooks suggests.
However, I do not look at this documentary as the sole truth, and I don't see this as my story retold through a black lens. I see this documentary as a survival against the odds, of community against the odds and of excellence against the odds. I don't believe my struggles are the same as those people represented in the documentary, but I do feel more connected to them than I do just about most films that had been released up to that point. I don't watch the movie to laugh at them, to belittle their achievements, to be entertained. I watch it to celebrate a black queer subculture, the framework that exists to creatively challenge and allows a disenfranchised group of outcasts to rebuild their lives and have a community and a family. I now see how problematic this movie is, but I will always love this movie for the extreme love it captures.
I wonder if bell would suggest that "love" I celebrate is also measured within a white supremacist patriarchal perspective.
I now understand how that movie is upsetting. The participants in the Balls, by and large black queer people, have nothing because they're living deep in a white supremacist patriarchal sphere, and within their largely black queer bubble have created a competition wherein they reward each other for excellence in achieving "beauty" as defined by the white supremacist patriarchal perspective. Participants in the Balls are intimately aware of the impossibility of achieving the kinds of material wealth, luxury and comfort they are convinced is the goal, convinced by the white supremacist patriarchal storytelling of popular culture, history, marketing and the beauty industry. I now see this very clearly, and it is as upsetting as bell hooks suggests.
However, I do not look at this documentary as the sole truth, and I don't see this as my story retold through a black lens. I see this documentary as a survival against the odds, of community against the odds and of excellence against the odds. I don't believe my struggles are the same as those people represented in the documentary, but I do feel more connected to them than I do just about most films that had been released up to that point. I don't watch the movie to laugh at them, to belittle their achievements, to be entertained. I watch it to celebrate a black queer subculture, the framework that exists to creatively challenge and allows a disenfranchised group of outcasts to rebuild their lives and have a community and a family. I now see how problematic this movie is, but I will always love this movie for the extreme love it captures.
I wonder if bell would suggest that "love" I celebrate is also measured within a white supremacist patriarchal perspective.
July 2, 2020
O livro trás à tona diversas reflexões em relação a subjetividade do negro, não o situando enquanto apenas parte pertencente de um todo objetivo, mas olhando e analisando as complexidades específicas de cada um. Dessa forma, Bell Hooks expõe que não existe uma análise totalizadora que engloba a realidade de todos os negros. Ao fazer isso, ela acaba realizando uma análise sensivel em todos os segmentos distintos que ela discorreu durante os artigos. Bell Hooks possui a capacidade de analisar e criticar representações conservadoras do negro na mídia e na cultura pop. Mas, ao criticar as representações, ela vai além, e nos convida não apenas a denunciar - ela reconhece que apenas isso não é o suficiente. Além de promover denúncias e críticas, a autora nos instiga para uma prática subversiva.
Caso seja do interesse de alguém, durante minha leitura fui atualizando esta lista que criei: https://letterboxd.com/nikphobia/list.... Acho interesse assistir aos filmes citados para assim desenvolver um diálogo com o livro.
Caso seja do interesse de alguém, durante minha leitura fui atualizando esta lista que criei: https://letterboxd.com/nikphobia/list.... Acho interesse assistir aos filmes citados para assim desenvolver um diálogo com o livro.
February 23, 2017
I am on a Bell Hooks train right now so I am currently reading a ton of her work and I have to say, these essays ARE incredible. As someone who is used to reading theory that can be convoluted and academic, Hooks is able to convey her opinions in a variety of essays that are tangible for anyone who takes the time to read them. Each essay left me with lasting gems so I will share some of my favorite moments from the essays. I enjoyed the essay, "Eating the Other", which delved into desire and resistance in a landscape in which individuals attempt to push the notion of post-raciality. Although one may desire someone of a different race/class/experience, one can't truly be an ally unless they are vulnerable with their partner and also understand that just because they have relations, doesn't mean that they aren't susceptible to racism or prejudice actions. I appreciated Hooks stating that instead of allies mulling in their guilt they should transform it into action that is positive and affective. I also appreciated the essay on radical black women and would like to revisit Angela Davis and her story because Hooks constantly stressed the importance of black women's narratives and understanding/learning from their experiences.
Another quote I truly appreciated was from the essay, "A feminist challenge" in which Hooks states, "Conservative Politics will rule the day if there is not sufficient protest, subversion and rebellion".
In one of her essays,Hooks also delves into the power of black film and representation of black individuals and women in media which is integral to the development of black culture in todays day and age. Overall, each essay definitely caused me to ponder upon how I define myself as well as my politics. I truly appreciated Hooks causing me to embrace my black and indigenous ancestry and can't wait to delve into more of her incredible work.
Another quote I truly appreciated was from the essay, "A feminist challenge" in which Hooks states, "Conservative Politics will rule the day if there is not sufficient protest, subversion and rebellion".
In one of her essays,Hooks also delves into the power of black film and representation of black individuals and women in media which is integral to the development of black culture in todays day and age. Overall, each essay definitely caused me to ponder upon how I define myself as well as my politics. I truly appreciated Hooks causing me to embrace my black and indigenous ancestry and can't wait to delve into more of her incredible work.
June 12, 2020
"Liberals may pride themselves in their ability to tolerate others but it is only after the other has been redescribed as oneself that the liberal is able to be “sensitive” to the question of cruelty and humiliation. This act of redescription is still an attempt to appropriate others, only here it is made to sound as if it were a generous act. It is an attempt to make an act of consumption appear to be an act of acknowledgment."
An invigorating and tragic and resisting collection of essays, all targeting how white supremacist capitalist patriarch delegitimizes ways of thinking in order to perpetuate itself. There's a clarity of complexity that makes each piece engaging, and a willingness to engage complexity itself - most heavily in the unexpected "A Feminist Challenge: Must We Call Every Woman Sister" where hooks considers how "unable to step outside the boundaries of patriarchal discourse, [Anita] Hill was never disloyal to patriarchy or, for that matter, to the institution of white supremacy." The essay is worth reading in full.
I do think hooks is a bit too individual-oriented in this particular critique (she later points out that "that ultimately the Thomas hearings were not only a public political spectacle orchestrated by whites but that whites were, indeed, the intended audience"), and I do think this approach does peek in elsewhere, but it's a powerful essay alongside the others that's worth engaging with. That's the sense you will walk away with: Black Looks demands you look it in the eye.
An invigorating and tragic and resisting collection of essays, all targeting how white supremacist capitalist patriarch delegitimizes ways of thinking in order to perpetuate itself. There's a clarity of complexity that makes each piece engaging, and a willingness to engage complexity itself - most heavily in the unexpected "A Feminist Challenge: Must We Call Every Woman Sister" where hooks considers how "unable to step outside the boundaries of patriarchal discourse, [Anita] Hill was never disloyal to patriarchy or, for that matter, to the institution of white supremacy." The essay is worth reading in full.
I do think hooks is a bit too individual-oriented in this particular critique (she later points out that "that ultimately the Thomas hearings were not only a public political spectacle orchestrated by whites but that whites were, indeed, the intended audience"), and I do think this approach does peek in elsewhere, but it's a powerful essay alongside the others that's worth engaging with. That's the sense you will walk away with: Black Looks demands you look it in the eye.
June 9, 2007
In this book, bell hooks has a piece on Madonna and why she's culturally insensitive and socially irresponsible. I first read that piece in 2001, well before her much-publicized and maligned baby-swiping. The essay is dated; it talks a lot about Truth Or Dare and Madonna's rise to stardom. And at the time, I thought, "She's definitely a poser, but I don't know if she's worth the vitriol, bell!"
Six years later, I absolutely believe she's worth the vitriol. And I say this as a fan.
This book is pretty awesome; it talks about how racist ideologies affect our daily interactions and our sexual perceptions. It definitely shaped how I saw people I've dated and how I choose my friends. Of course, I have to offer my usual bell hooks disclaimer, which is that I don't always agree with her... but I do like her a lot and enjoy reading what she has to say.
Six years later, I absolutely believe she's worth the vitriol. And I say this as a fan.
This book is pretty awesome; it talks about how racist ideologies affect our daily interactions and our sexual perceptions. It definitely shaped how I saw people I've dated and how I choose my friends. Of course, I have to offer my usual bell hooks disclaimer, which is that I don't always agree with her... but I do like her a lot and enjoy reading what she has to say.
February 1, 2011
i just re-read this book since it was in my house and overdue to the library. just as awesome as i remembered. one bit that stood out to me, after participating in a gazillion conversations about oppression street cred and what it authorizes you to do (i.e. i grew up working-class, so i can buy a condo on the frontlines of gentrification, the end.) :
and indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege who are in no way victimized are capable, via there political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. it can be based on one' political and ethical understanding of racism and one's rejection of domination. (14)
and indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege who are in no way victimized are capable, via there political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. it can be based on one' political and ethical understanding of racism and one's rejection of domination. (14)
October 3, 2015
Another great bell hooks book! I really appreciated the first essay and and some in the back. My confession? Her essays on popular culture are somewhat less than interesting to me simply because the culture she's talking about is decades old--unless of course I've experienced the culture she's talking about. And if I take time to go back and look at the references--interesting stuff. But that doesn't always happen. My confession aside, I do recommend this book!
May 20, 2009
Any bell hooks book is worth a read. In this collection of 12 essays hooks takes on popular music, advertising, literature, television, historical narrative, and film in an exploration of race, representation, and resistance. Should be required reading for the planet. Her perspective is fresh and stimulating and definitely against the grain.
April 23, 2010
LJ user velvetlungs:
Good introductory work to bell hooks. She talks a lot of the intersectionality of feminism and race issues. Dissects African American sexuality and race in the modern media (at the time). I don't ALWAYS agree with her but she does raise some good points and makes you think.
Good introductory work to bell hooks. She talks a lot of the intersectionality of feminism and race issues. Dissects African American sexuality and race in the modern media (at the time). I don't ALWAYS agree with her but she does raise some good points and makes you think.
August 4, 2014
excellent and unique critical analysis of culture, race, and gender. her theories expose a lot of the hidden mechanisms of colionalist thinking. she reveals how deeply entrenched we are in the hegemony of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by deconstructing the extent to which these oppressive mechanisms become masked, normalized, and internalized.
March 3, 2017
This was an excellent analysis on gender, race, and of course heritage. Bell Hooks' theories focused on 'the hidden standards' of thinking on race and how imperialists oppressed mankind. This was a deep read but so worth the knowledge given on how LIVES matters and how we as a people tend to repeat history with favoritism of race and gender.
5 scholarly stars *****
5 scholarly stars *****
April 8, 2010
Among other interesting articles, this volume includes a scathing review and analysis of one of the biggest documentaries produced about gender variant people, Jennifer Livingston's 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning.
April 26, 2019
Only read chapter 3: "Revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves Subject", but then again, I limited myself to that chapter for an academic purpose. But I plan on going back and reading all the other chapters. For now, it's going on my "has been read" booklist.
Loving it!
Loving it!
July 10, 2018
The essays about black subjectivity in 90s culture need an update. Otherwise, hooks’ unapologetic style and confidence season these essays with urgency and wit. The Oppositional Gaze is an all-time great piece of cultural criticism.
December 17, 2024
Everyone should read this. It is provocative, disruptive, and most importantly it is a reclamation of black history that summons readers to liberate and decolonise their existence within culture and mostly importantly in their minds.
September 28, 2018
Very interesting, well thought out and written essays that feel timely even today. There's a lot that hasn't changed at all. I think many of these essays could be written now, which is depressing.
April 27, 2024
Props to Prof. Singh for putting this on the required reading list, ily girlie.
I don't think that I can be that person who writes a review on here that's all academic and critical, mostly because I'm an unqualified silly goose.
I CAN tell you that this is a must-read. There is a pervasive relevance in every chapter. I learned so much, both personally and from the perspective of a communications & media student. Evaluating my pre-existing constructs of race is an important step before taking on the responsibility of mediating political discussion through the creation of new cultural texts (because **NEWS FLASH**, all pop culture is inherently political... creds John Storey).
"Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance" lives in my mind rent-free. Consumer cannibalism as a more insidious form of exploitation reminds me of the use of subjectification in a post-feminist mediascape. Blatant exploitation is the most secretive form, parading around under the protective blanket of patriarchal and white supremacist hegemony.
How does anyone create truly subversive media when its existence relies upon the existence of an oppressor? How do we interact with race in a manner that is both neutral and founded in the context of all in which we live and what came before us (shout out to Kamala, her mother, and a coconut tree)? Does neutrality exist, or is it only present in the language of privilege?
What a privilege to be able to read this from a book and not be forced to confront it every day as a condition of my mere existence. And did I accidentally give some references? This semester really boiled my brains. I was one step away from a full MLA citation situation.
I don't think that I can be that person who writes a review on here that's all academic and critical, mostly because I'm an unqualified silly goose.
I CAN tell you that this is a must-read. There is a pervasive relevance in every chapter. I learned so much, both personally and from the perspective of a communications & media student. Evaluating my pre-existing constructs of race is an important step before taking on the responsibility of mediating political discussion through the creation of new cultural texts (because **NEWS FLASH**, all pop culture is inherently political... creds John Storey).
"Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance" lives in my mind rent-free. Consumer cannibalism as a more insidious form of exploitation reminds me of the use of subjectification in a post-feminist mediascape. Blatant exploitation is the most secretive form, parading around under the protective blanket of patriarchal and white supremacist hegemony.
How does anyone create truly subversive media when its existence relies upon the existence of an oppressor? How do we interact with race in a manner that is both neutral and founded in the context of all in which we live and what came before us (shout out to Kamala, her mother, and a coconut tree)? Does neutrality exist, or is it only present in the language of privilege?
What a privilege to be able to read this from a book and not be forced to confront it every day as a condition of my mere existence. And did I accidentally give some references? This semester really boiled my brains. I was one step away from a full MLA citation situation.
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