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bell hooks

Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness

Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952,

Named Gloria Watkins, took her grandmother's name, dropped the capital letters

Started writing her first book Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism when she was 19 years old.

Prominent scholar of Cultural Criticism rather than philosophy

Question: should we have a reading by someone who is "not" a "philosopher"?

Teaches at City College on New York.

Looking at Standpoint here:

Question: How does the place "where we stand" determine what we know?

Look at the discussion questions for this reading:

367.

1. Consider your own social status: your job, the school you attend, your economics class (???--Econ 101 or are you rich or poor), and so forth. Do you occupy a privileged position or a position on the periphery? How difficult would it be for you to hypothetically occupy a marginal standpoint? If you already occupy a marginal standpoint, how difficult would it be to occupy a privileged position? What changes would you have to make in order to be in solidarity with those on the margins? Would such a standpoint be possible for you?

Hooks looking at the margin as a space of radical openness

Effectively: it's good to be on the margin.

2. To what degree are persons who have suffered prejudice and injustice responsible for provoking change and creating resistance? To what degree are others who have not suffered these injustices also responsible? How do you believe hooks would answer this question? Do you agree with her view or not?

Go to Article:

Start out with Hook's question: "What does it mean to enjoy reading Beloved, admire Schooldaze, and have a theoretical interest in poststructural theory? (363 c1)

Question: anyone ever see Schooldaze or read Beloved?

hooks talks about the fact of "oppositional political struggle.

If we enjoy the things she's talking about, that "moves us out of one's place"

Question: how important is it that we 'know our place'?

hooks is very biographical in her approach:

Talks a lot about her own personal development

A young African-American woman from the poor side of the tracks in Hopkinsville, Ky now in the big time of academic, intellectual, literary circles.

Hooks is a well respected, yet controversial cultural theorist

Her Question: How does she express the multiple voices of who she is, where she's from?

On the one side: the "thickly accented Black Southern speech" of her childhood.

On the other: the critical, intellectual language of her current stature and profession.

Hooks looking at herself as an example of the margin as the space of radical openness

What about the intellectual, scholarly language

Quotes poet Adrienne Rich "That's the oppressor's language, yet I need it to talk to you."

Hooks says, "that's the language that enabled me to attend graduate school, to write a dissertation, to speak at job interviews, carries the scent of oppression."

Question: if you are resistant to using a scholarly form of language, is it because you identify that language with a "scent of oppression"?

Key point here: Language is a place of struggle!

Question: what does that mean?

hooks talks about her own growing up and developing as a critical thinker as a struggle

365 c2

I talk about punishment, about mama and daddy aggressively silencing me, about the censorship of Black communities. I had no choice. I had to struggle and resist to emerge from that context and them from other locations with mind intact, with an open heart. I had to leave that space I called home to move beyond boundaries, yet I needed also to return there.

Question: can you empathize with this kind of struggle, or is it just her?

Hooks talks about her own struggle as an underclass black woman at a privileged university:

Who is she supposed to be in that situation:

For example, should she be "an exotic other"

She also has to watch out for the higher class black people.

They don't think she belongs (see the movie Schooldaze)

She's always trying to reconcile her new critical intellectual personality with her "downhome" life

Gets to the Main topic: The Margin as a space of radical openness

hooks on this "margin"

Normally the margin is thought of as a bad place to be.

You on the margin you're "marginal"

You're not really in the group, you're on the edges.

Hooks admits that the margin is not a safe place.

But: Marginality much more than a site of deprivation

Also a "space of resistence"

She says it is a central location for the production of a "counter hegemonic" discourse

Question: do we need a "counter hegemonic" discourse?

Goal from the margin: changing the colonizers tongue forever

she writes:

366 c1

Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people.

If we only view the margin as a sign marking the despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being.

It is there in that space of collective despair that one's creativity, one's imagination is at risk, there that one's mind if fully colonized, there that the freedom one longs for is lost.

She also reminds us that this marginality isn't pure: someone can't be purely marginal.

Moves to a Discussion of "The Other"

Most discussions of The Other talk about one and other

The oppressive in group, and the oppressed out group

If you're in the in group, you have an obligation to pity the out group.

If you're in the out group, you're part of an exotic other, an alien visiting our world, or you're living over there in oppression land.

Question: what is your impression of "the oppressed"?

hooks calls this approach to "the other" as " an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences."

Rather than pity the oppressed, and regard them as wholly other, recognize that:

The marginal as a place of resistance rather than a site of domination.

Long discussion of: "Enter that space. We greet you as liberators."

Idea here: go to the margin, meet the "marginal" people. You'll be liberated from hegemonic oppression.

Question: what do people who are not an oppressed other have to be liberated from?

Closes. 367

I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as a site of resistance-as location of radical openness and possibility.

Concludes

We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.