Talking Back
Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
In childhood, bell hooks was taught that "talking back" meant speaking as an equal to an authority figure and daring to disagree and/or have an opinion. In this collection of personal and theoretical essays, hooks reflects on her signature issues of racism and feminism, politics and pedagogy. Among her discoveries is that moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side, a gesture of defiance that heals, making new life and new growth possible.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hooks, a pen name for Gloria Watkins, the author of Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism , here gathers essays that also focus on being black and feminist in America. She begins by recounting painful personal experiences: growing up in a repressive, Southern, ``father-dominated household,'' attending a segregated high school, struggling to find her own, persuasive voice and become a writer, and learning to deal with racism and sexism while studying at ``predominately white universities'' in Wisconsin and California. Hooks then moves on to a general discussion of the women's movement and how ``white supremacy'' in our society adversely affects it. Although the author makes perceptive and provocative observations, they are diminished by redundancy and weakened by her doctrinaire Marxist rhetoric: ``In resistance, the exploited, the oppressed work to expose the false realityto reclaim and recover ourselves. We make the revolutionary history.'' In addition, the author employs labels such as ``got everything White people.'' Ultimately, she fails to convince or even to use her own voice.
