Repowering Intellectual Life. bell hooks and the Critique of Racial Education

Abstract

For bell hooks, the relationship between teaching and learning is historical. What the academy is from the perspective of a concept of knowledge that is historically located within differences of race, class and gender, what hierarchies it reaffirms and what spaces of thought it opens is the focus of hooks' reflection on education. Faced with the corporatization of the US university, the institutionalization of women's and black studies, hooks puts forward a radical vision of education, which considers teaching a transgression of any “bureaucratization of the mind:” learning is about opening up a process of collective transformation.