Black Looks: Race and Representation by bell hooks

Publishers Weekly

This latest collection from hooks ( Yearning ) contains a dozen recent essays on the representation of the African American experience, an area in which, she argues convincingly, little progress has been made. The author draws more effectively on her own experiences and sense of identity than do most other writers in the critical theory arena. Her gaze often falls on the ostensible recuperation of blackness into advertising, fashion and pop culture. She denounces white radicals' appropriation of an African American Other that revels in the oneness of a ``primitive'' people with nature. As she points out, the next step in that process is the commodification of the ``primitive'' by consumer culture. In other essays hooks offers brilliant analyses of the Hill-Thomas hearings and of Madonna, forcing readers to confront issues of race and representation that fans of the Material Girl would probably rather ignore and revealing the underlying reactionary bent of her music and videos. Equally striking is hooks's linkage of feminism and gay and lesbian liberation to black liberation, with a resulting rejection of a narrow and facile nationalism. Imbued with hooks's theoretical rigor, intellectual integrity, breadth of knowledge and passion, this book is a necessary read for anyone concerned with race in America. (Aug.)

Library Journal

Hooks continues to produce some of the most challenging, insightful, and provocative writing on race and gender in the United States today. In these new essays,the author/academician expands on a theme introduced in Breaking Bread with Cornel West ( LJ 12/91) and in earlier works: In a society that increasingly substitutes style for substance, how are the races represented to one another? Maintaining that white commodification cannibalizes African American culture, sell ing blacks a supermacho image that encourages violence and the subjugation of black women, hooks successfully confronts last fall's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, imperialist images in yuppie mail-order catalogs, Madonna's use of black signifiers, the curious color blindness of feminist film criticism, relations between blacks and Native Americans, and other original and important topics. Highly recommended.-- Beverly Miller, Boise State Univ. Lib., Id.

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