bell hooks: The Last Interview
and Other Conversations
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"With a thoughtful introduction by Mikki Kendall, it will remind you why she was loved, honored, challenged and respected." - Ms. Magazine
“This new collection is essential reading for both longtime readers of hooks and new fans seeking to learn more about her groundbreaking contributions to cultural and intellectual movements.” - Electric Lit
"Wide-ranging and insightful, this makes for a solid primer on hooks’s ideas." --Publishers Weekly
"I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance."
—bell hooks
bell hooks was a prolific, trailblazing author, feminist, social activist, cultural critic, and professor. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell used her pen name to center attention on her ideas and to honor her courageous great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.
hooks’s unflinching dedication to her work carved deep grooves for the feminist and anti-racist movements. In this collection of 7 interviews, stretching from early in her career until her last interview, she discusses feminism, the complexity of rap music and masculinity, her relationship to Buddhism, the “politic of domination,” sexuality, and love and the importance of communication across cultural borders. Whether she was sparking controversy on campuses or facing criticism from contemporaries, hooks relentlessly challenged herself and those around her, inserted herself into the tensions of the cultural moment, and anchored herself with love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stimulating latest in Melville's Last Interview series collects six conversations—spanning from 1989 to 2017—with feminist theorist bell hooks, who died in 2021. Speaking with sociologist Yvonne Zylan in 1989, hooks reflected on the contentious reception to a lecture she had given earlier that year at Yale Law School, maintaining that "a lot of the hostility that people feel towards me is that we simply do live in a world where women don't often assert power, and that people get pissed off when women do." Elsewhere, hooks critiques sexism in the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, arguing in an interview with Tricycle magazine that the Buddhist monk's disapproval of casual sex conforms with "very traditional" notions of women's propriety. In a 1994 interview for Bomb Magazine, she castigates gangsta rap for its misogynistic lyrics even as she "embrace the rage... and the sense of powerlessness that undergirds it." Other conversations touch on hooks's ambivalence about her Kentucky upbringing, the importance of intersectionality, and obstacles to fulfilling relationships, demonstrating the incisive analysis of race and gender that earned her a devoted following. Wide-ranging and insightful, this makes for a solid primer on hooks's ideas.
