White Male Ways of Knowing

About two years ago my friend Mike sent me bell hooks’s review of Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing,” which was published in Zeta Magazine.¹ Mike’s photocopy budget is even worse than mine, so I figured if he went to the trouble of smuggling these pages out to me then he really wanted me to read them. So I did. I had seen the film prior to reading the review, and, just like hooks’s white male colleagues, I too had “loved it” (10). Her critical review challenged me to rethink my initial response to the film, and got me interested in reading more of her work. So I sent a check to South End Press for copies of Ain’t I a Woman (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989), and Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990). Here I will focus on Yearning. This book in particular has encouraged me to join with her in interrogating the racism and sexism of postmodern American culture. Yearning consists of twenty-three short essays, including a dialogue with Cornel West on relationships between black men and black women, and a concluding piece in which she playfully interviews herself. Like her review of “Do The Right Thing,” a number of the remaining essays initially appeared elsewhere: in Zeta Magazine, Inscriptions, Art Forum, Sojourner, Framework, Emerge. Pulling these essays together in one volume has undoubtedly made her cultural criticism available to a much larger audience than the few readers of these publications.

The essays cover a lot of territory and are not easily classified. Some chapters (e.g., “Stylish Nihilism,” “Representing Whiteness,” “Counter-Hegemonic Art,” “A Call For Militant Resistance”) might be fairly called film criticism. In several other places (e.g., “Liberation Scenes,” “Postmodern Blackness,” “Culture to Culture,” “Critical Interrogation”) she discusses and evaluates trends in cultural criticism. And then, from another direction (“The Chitlin Circuit,” “Homeplace,” “Sitting at the Feet of the Messenger,” “Aesthetic Inheritances,” “Saving Black Folk Culture”) she remembers and celebrates African-American culture and politics. But one shouldn’t put too much weight on these categories. You are as likely to find autobiographical reflections in the film reviews as in the more properly autobiographical pieces, and references to films, novels, theoretical trends and biographies turn up everywhere. As she writes in the last essay, “There are so many locations in this book, such journeying” (229). Hooks’s excursions erase all boundaries, leave all genres blurred.

For hooks, radical cultural criticism is rooted in a commitment to black liberation struggle. She examines representations of black people and black life in literature and popular culture to understand how such representations enhance and undermine the capacity of African-Americans to determine their own fate. She focuses, in particular, on the ways in which such representations work to either enslave or liberate blacks, reinforce or challenge racism in whites, and sustain or subvert white supremacy. She also remains critical of the ways in which both women’s liberation and black liberation continue to be practiced as if black women did not exist.

OK. What you’ve mostly gotten so far is the dust-jacket perspective of Anyreader—the sort of “view from nowhere” I was taught to write in graduate school. It’s also the kind of “review” I might have written before reading Yearning—before getting my lesson in racial awareness. Hooks won’t let me forget who I am. So, as it turns out, I’m not Anyreader. I’m a white guy.

Many of hooks’s readers are white guys; certainly most of the subscribers to Postmodern Culture are. And have you ever considered the volume of material and cultural capital upon which this discourse rests? To participate in this e-mail discussion one not only has to have a modem, but also a position of some status in or near the state bureaucracy. And you also have to know how to talk the postmodern talk. Hooks knows where postmodern theory comes from and approaches it warily...