African-American author and theorist Bell Hooks, one of the most powerful voices among feminist movements in recent decades, passed away on December 15 in Berea, Kentucky. She was 69 years old.
Gloria Jean Watkins was born September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a rural and poor state, where segregation then applied, forcing the young woman to begin her education in an establishment reserved for blacks. She was 16 when Martin Luther King (1929-1968) was assassinated. Between the ultramodernity of California, where she began studying literature, and the rurality of Wisconsin, where she completed her masters, then Ohio, where she taught, bell hooks seemed to have refused to choose. Since 2004, she had put her bags in Kentucky and taught at the University of Berea.
It is with his first collection of poetry, And There We Wept (“And there we cry”, 1978, untranslated), that she forged the pseudonym bell hooks – which she insisted on writing without capital letters, as if to fade behind her texts. While completing her doctorate, devoted to the African-American novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), she published an essay, Ain’t I a Woman? Black women and Feminism (nineteen eighty one). We will have to wait until 2015 for the text to reach us in French, under the title Am I not a woman? Black women and feminism (Cambourakis).
This monumental work, the writing of which spanned seven years, is described by its author as “Love letter from me to black women”. She traces the history of these women, from slavery to the early 1980s, when the feminism of her time tended to relegate them to the background. Am I not a woman? is a combative book in its critique of white feminisms as well as black liberation movements. Founder of what is now called “Black Femimism”, he paved the way for intersectional thinking, at the intersection of the discriminations of racism and sexism.
A modern vision of the intimate story
As an extension of this text, From the Margin to the Center: Feminist Theory (1984; Cambourakis, 2017) calls for a review of the goals of feminist movements, with the aim of including all women – and not just those of the white and educated upper middle class. Historicized, social, racial and sexual categories appear as what they are: political constructions, which political work can therefore allow to modify.
You have 44.61% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
