1. Bell hooks was best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class.
28 Facts About Bell hooks
1. 2.
Bell hooks used the lower-case spelling of her name to decenter herself and draw attention to her work instead.
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Bell hooks published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books.
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Bell hooks published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures.
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Bell hooks began her academic career in 1976 teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California.
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Bell hooks later taught at several institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, New College of Florida, and The City College of New York, before joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 2004.
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In 2014, hooks founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College.
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Bell hooks's father worked as a janitor and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families.
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In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, Bell hooks 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".
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Also, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is mentioned in Bell hooks' book Teaching to Transgress.
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Bell hooks began her academic career in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of Southern California.
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Bell hooks 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 [she] greatly admired".
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Bell hooks said she put the name in lowercase letters to convey that what is most important to focus upon is her works, not her personal qualities: the "substance of books, not who [she is]".
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In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Bell hooks develops a critique of white feminist racism in second-wave feminism, which she argued undermined the possibility of feminist solidarity across racial lines.
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Particularly, Bell hooks' strives to make scholarship on theory accessible to "be read and understood across different class boundaries".
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In 2002, Bell hooks gave a commencement speech at Southwestern University.
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Bell hooks was a scholar in residence at The New School on three occasions, the last time in 2014.
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Also in 2014, the bell hooks Institute was founded at Berea College; in 2017 she dedicated her papers to the college.
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Bell hooks was often critical of the films of Spike Lee.
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Bell hooks said that he wrote Black women in the same objectifying way that White male filmmakers write the characters of White women.
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Bell hooks criticized the documentary Paris Is Burning for depicting the ritual of the balls as a spectacle to "pleasure" white spectators.
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Bell hooks was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.
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Bell hooks used the term "pas" from the French language, translating to "not" in the English language.
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On December 15,2021, bell hooks died from kidney failure at her home in Berea, Kentucky, aged 69.
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Bell hooks described herself as finding Buddhism as part of a personal journey in her youth, centered on seeking to recenter love and spirituality in her life and configure these concepts into her focus on activism and justice.
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Bell hooks was drawn to Buddhism because of the personal and academic framework it offered her to understand and respond to suffering and discrimination as well as love and connection.
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Bell hooks describes the Christian-Buddhist focus on everyday practice as fulfilling the centering and grounding needs of her everyday life.
28.
The popularity of Bell hooks' writing surged amidst the racial justice movements ignited by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, with her book All About Love: New Visions entering the New York Times bestseller list over 20 years after its publication.