Bell Hooks (1952-2021) American Author

Bell Hooks (1952-2021) American Author dies at 15 December 2021

Bell Hooks American Author (1952-2021)

Gloria Jean Watkins better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist

Gloria Jean Watkins, she attended segregated schools in Christian County, then went on to Stanford University in California, then earned a master’s in English at the University of Wisconsin and a doctorate in literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She adopted her great-grandmother’s name as her pen name in lower case letters, she told interviewers, in order to emphasize the “substance of books, not who I am.”

She published her first book, “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism” in 1981. Her literary career continued with more than 40 books of including essays, poetry and children’s books. Her topics include feminism, racism, culture, politics, gender roles, love, and spirituality. An international poet, memoirist, social critic and professor, she wrote more than 30 books, mixing the personal and the political in essays that examined Madonna music videos, Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, the representation of Black Americans in film and the nature of love.

In 2004, she returned to Kentucky to teach at Berea College. Another book, “Belonging: A Culture of Place,” discussed her move back. In 2010, the school opened the bell hooks Institute at Berea College. The institute houses her collection of contemporary African-American art, personal artifacts and copies of her books published in other languages. The center has attracted visitors such as Gloria Steinem, actress Emma Watson and Cornel West. She passed away in her home surrounded by close family and friends at the age of 69.

Full Bio

Early life

Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky, to a working-class African-American family. Watkins was one of six children born to Rosa Bell Watkins (née Oldham) and Veodis Watkins. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families. In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), Watkins would write of her “struggle to create self and identity” while growing up in “a rich magical world of southern black culture that was sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying.”

An avid reader (with poets William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gwendolyn Brooks among her favorites), Watkins was educated in racially segregated public schools, later moving to an integrated school in the late 1960s. She graduated from Hopkinsville High School before obtaining her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. During this time, Watkins was writing her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which she began at the age of 19 (ca. 1971) and then published in 1981.

In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison entitled “Keeping a Hold on Life: Reading Toni Morrison’s Fiction”.

Teaching and writing

She began her academic career in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics, a Los Angeles publisher, released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept (1978), written under the name “bell hooks”. She had adopted her maternal great-grandmother’s name as her pen name because, as she later put it, her great-grandmother “was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which I greatly admired,”^{[citation needed]}. She also said she put the name in lowercase letters both to honor her great-grandmother and to convey that what is most important to focus upon is her works, not her personal qualities: the “substance of books, not who I am.” About the unconventional lowercasing of her pen name, hooks added that, “When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late ‘60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: Let’s talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less… It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it.”

In the early 1980s and 1990s, hooks taught at several post-secondary institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Yale (1985 to 1988, as assistant professor of African and Afro-American studies and English), Oberlin College (1988 to 1994, as associate professor of American literature and women’s studies), and, beginning in 1994, as distinguished professor of English at City College of New York.

South End Press published her first major work, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, in 1981, though she had written it years earlier while still an undergraduate. In the decades since its publication, Ain’t I a Woman? has been recognized for its contribution to feminist thought, with Publishers Weekly in 1992 naming it “One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years.” Writing in The New York Times in 2019, Min Jin Lee said that Ain’t I a Woman “remains a radical and relevant work of political theory. 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.” Ain’t I a Woman? examines themes including the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy and the marginalization of black women.

At the same time, hooks became significant as a leftist and postmodern political thinker and cultural critic. She published more than 30 books, ranging in topics from black men, patriarchy, and masculinity to self-help; engaged pedagogy to personal memoirs; and sexuality (in regards to feminism and politics of aesthetics and visual culture). Reel to Real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996) collects film essays, reviews, and interviews with film directors. In The New Yorker, Hua Hsu said these interviews displayed the facet of hooks’s work that was “curious, empathetic, searching for comrades”.

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), hooks develops a critique of white feminist racism in second-wave feminism, which she argued undermined the possibility of feminist solidarity across racial lines.

As hooks argued, communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are necessary for the feminist movement because without them people may not grow to recognize gender inequalities in society.

Find a grave Bell Hooks

In 2002, hooks gave a commencement speech at Southwestern University. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke against what she saw as government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who she believed went along with such practices. The Austin Chronicle reported that many in the audience booed the speech, though “several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug.”

In 2004, she joined Berea College as Distinguished Professor in Residence. Her 2008 book, belonging: a culture of place, includes an interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky. She was a scholar in residence at The New School on three occasions, most recently in 2014. Also in 2014, the bell hooks Institute was founded at Berea College, where she donated her papers in 2017.

She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.

Bell Hooks Personal life

Regarding her sexual identity, hooks described herself as “queer-pas-gay”.

Bell Hooks Death

On December 15, 2021, hooks died from kidney failure at her home in Berea, Kentucky, aged 69.