Belonging: A Culture of Place by Bell Hooks (review)

The recent re-release of bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place will be welcomed afresh on the bookshelves of cultural geographers of the US South. While hooks’ writing is evocative of that of a memoir, the reoccurring themes in her essays are ones that are deeply placed and geographic. Belonging differs both structurally and stylistically from contemporary geographic scholarship; yet, while the disjointed, non-sequential life narratives and social commentaries may require the social scientist to engage with perhaps uncomfortable or unfamiliar writing constructions, hooks discusses familiar topics from a different, more personal vantage point. This approach rooted in the humanities is refreshing and one that should especially help southern scholars and cultural human geographers reconsider commonly discussed themes in a different light.

As the title suggests, a major topical refrain throughout the collection centers the idea of belonging. Specifically, hooks reflects on her assessment of belonging in her beloved Kentucky. She imagines her Kentucky home as a part of the South and Appalachia and understands the contradictions embedded in those regions for her, a black woman, that on the surface seem to bar her from finding an accepting home there. The racial politics, history, and dynamics that are a part of spatial placemaking processes are vital to her understanding of herself and where she belongs. hooks recognizes the “serious dys-functional aspect for the southern world” she encounters when she moves to a racist-informed town after living in an isolated, rural setting for much of her life (p. 19). Though she holds her home in high esteem, she admonishes the state of what she often refers to as the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” in the South and the United States more broadly. There is pain in remembering the racism of her southern childhood that was conceived of and wielded by both blacks and whites, and these memories still clearly influence her notions of self, identity, and belonging in her contemporary living. She ponders a hopeful future America, however, where “cultural allegiance need not blind us to the need to…live beyond the artificial boundaries set by racist notions of race” (pp. 83–84).

hooks explicitly emphasizes her experiences of belonging in Kentucky. This particular “geography more so than any other factor shaped [her] destiny” (p. 170). hooks first discovers her sense of Kentucky as home by leaving it. This is a salient theme throughout the essays; her attendance at Stanford University in California was an exile from the norms of Kentucky with which she had grown up, and this journey was, as she says, “crucial” to her understanding of the politics of her Kentucky home (p. 100). hooks takes a deep look into what an understanding of one’s place of belonging looks like; for her, it was a physical removal from that space to experience another place. Geographers should note this case study of an individual making sense of her world and how experiences of the foreign inform experiences of the home. hooks echoes this by noting that “our constants exist within a framework where everything is always changing” (p. 25) and that “exile can…utterly transform one’s perception of the world of home” (p. 14). Her exile and eventual return help her to make create a place of home in her native state. Through the essays, this narrative of placemaking is woven into an extremely insightful story about one’s attempt to belong amidst the cultural, social, and political backdrops of the South that are often discussed in more broad, clinical terms in geography. hooks injects a fresh, detailed, and personal vision of these placemaking processes into a larger canon of southern geographical texts.

Geographers will also note hooks’ focus on land itself as a powerful agent in the making of place. She conceives of land differently than empty geographic space or even place imbued with sociopolitical meaning. She rather takes an almost neo-transcendental perspective of the power of nature and...