Bell hooks, innovative feminist thinker, died at age 69
[ad_1]
Bell Hooks, author, educator, and innovative activist, has died. She was 69 years old.
In a statement issued by William Morrow Publishers, Hooks’ family announced that he died Wednesday in Berea, Kentucky, home of Berea College’s Bell Hooks Center. Additional details were not immediately available.
“She was a giant person, no nonsense, who lived by her own rules and told her own truth at a time when blacks, and especially women, did not feel empowered to do so,” said Dr. Linda Strong-Leek, a close one. friend and former rector of Berea College, he wrote in an email to The Associated Press.
“It was a privilege to meet her, and today the world is a smaller place because she’s gone. There will never be another beautiful hook.”
“The real resistance starts with people facing pain … and they want to do something to change it.” – bell hooks
William Morrow Publishers laments the loss of Bell Hooks, New York Times best-selling author, esteemed professor, public intellectual, cultural critic, and visionary. pic.twitter.com/oKA6nJYeEO
Beginning in the 1970s, Hooks published dozens of books that helped shape popular and academic discourse. His notable works include Am I not a woman? Black women and feminism, Feminist theory: from the margin to the center i All about love: new visions.
Rejecting the isolation of feminism, civil rights, and the economy in separate camps, she believed in community and connectivity and in how racism, sexism, and economic disparity were mutually reinforcing.
Among her most famous expressions was her definition of feminism, which she called “a movement to end sexist sexism, exploitation, and oppression.”
Ibram X. Kendi, Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom were among those mourning hooks. Author Saeed Jones noted that her death came just one week after the loss of famed black author and critic Greg Tate. “Everything feels so pointed,” he tweeted Wednesday.
Oh my heart. bell hooks. Let her rest in power. His loss is incalculable.
hooks taught at numerous schools, including Yale University, Oberlin College, and New York City College. He joined Berea College in 2004 and a decade later founded the center that bore his name, where “many and varied expressions of difference can thrive.”
Hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in the segregated town of Hopkinsville, Ky., And was later given the pseudonym Bell Hooks in honor of her maternal great-grandmother. She enjoyed reading from an early age, majored in English at Stanford University, and received a master’s degree in English from the University of Wisconsin, where she began writing. Am I not a woman?
His early influences ranged from James Baldwin and Sojourner Truth to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Martin Luther King was my teacher in understanding the importance of the beloved community. “. he said in an interview published in Appalachian Heritage in 2012.
Hooks examined how stereotypes influence everything from movies (“the opposition look”) to love, writing All About Love that “much of what they taught us about the nature of love makes no sense when applied to everyday life.”
He also extensively documented the collective identity and past of blacks in rural Kentucky, a part of the state often portrayed as largely white and homogeneous.
“I pay tribute to the past as a resource that can serve as a basis for us to review and renew our commitment to the present, to make a world where all people can live fully and well, where everyone can belong,” he wrote in the magazine . Belonging: a culture of place.