hooks lays the groundwork of her feminist theory by giving historical evidence of the specific sexism that black female slaves endured and how that legacy affects black womanhood today. Now, 38 years after its publication in 1981, “Ain’t I A Woman” remains a radical and relevant work of political theory. As in Truth’s political activism, hooks asserts that one cannot separate race from gender, history and class when considering a person’s freedom.
For nearly four decades, hooks has written and published with clarity, novel insight and extraordinary precision about art, media, race, gender and class.įor this now canonical text, hooks took her title from a line in the 1863 published version of Sojourner Truth’s speech in favor of women’s suffrage, which she gave in 1851 in Akron, Ohio. She is the founder of the bell hooks Institute and is recognized globally as a feminist activist and cultural critic. Since then she has published three dozen books and teaches in her home state of Kentucky at Berea College, a liberal arts college that does not charge tuition to any of its students. Gloria Watkins was a 19-year-old undergraduate at Stanford University when she wrote her first draft of “Ain’t I A Woman,” and she published the book when she was 29 years old, after she received her doctorate in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Watkins wanted her pen name to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas. Gloria Watkins published her first book, “Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism,” under her pen name, bell hooks, in honor of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She didn’t assign her own writing, but of course my friends and I went to the bookstore to find it. No, I think, we were falling in love with thinking and imagining again. The temperature in the room seemed to change in her presence because everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain. Large, horn-rimmed glasses framed the open gaze of her genuinely curious mind. She was in her mid-30s then but looked much younger. She was soft-spoken with a faint Southern accent, which I attributed to her birthplace, Hopkinsville, Ky. Gloria - as we were allowed to address her in the classroom - had a slight figure with elegant wrists that peeked out of her tunic sweater sleeves. I signed up for “Introduction to African-American Literature,” which was taught by Gloria Watkins, an assistant professor in the English department, and she was such a wonderful teacher that I signed up for her other class, “Black Women and Their Fiction.”
I’d been in the United States for 11 years, and although I was a history major, I wanted to read novels again.
0 kommentar(er)
