USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics

For bell hooks: “White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy” and “Feminism is for Everybody” in U.S. History and Politics

Paola Rudan — 2023-03-06

This sixth issue of USAbroad aims to celebrate the importance and impact of bell hooks’ work, which challenges the national and international boundaries of academic disciplines and of the cultural marketplace to present a “feminism for everybody,” accessible beyond national, academic and corporate languages.

The Publishing History of bell hooks in Italy

Maria Nadotti — 2023-03-06

The essay reconstructs the publishing history of bell hooks in Italy, showing the link between her works and the progress of the country. After a period of silence, in the last few years, her name has returned to the fore. Some topics which, at the end of the Twentieth century, seemed futuristic, for instance that of ‘intersectionality’, had visibly been proposed within Italian society. This different Italy, no longer white or aware of being no longer populated only by productive white males, was finding its own words and its own theoretical benchmarks. bell hooks had finally met her public.

The Homeplace, the Margin and the Classroom: Mapping Radical Liberation

Maria Mercone — 2023-03-06

The homeplace, the margin and the classroom could be conceived as the hallmarks of bell hooks’ theoretical reflection on the historical link between space and political resistance. Designed as locations of racial and gender oppression, those spaces have been turned into radical sites of antiracist pedagogy and African American resistance. Hence, mapping these locations of struggle means connecting the historical production of space to the process of radical political subjectification within the African American context. The ultimate intent of the essay is in fact to connect bell hooks’ writings on the locations of domination/liberation with the Black Radical Tradition.

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

Roberta Ferrari — 2023-03-06

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.

“To Enact a Postmodernism of Resistance”: The Transgressive Thought of bell hooks and the Interdisciplinarity of White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy

Hue Woodson — 2023-03-06

Through enacting what she refers to as “a postmodernism of resistance,” bell hooks works out and works through a methodology of transgressive thought, through a radical rhetoric of feminist ideology. When mouthed, this radical rhetoric is significantly inaugurated in part by the well-known text, Ain’t I A Woman, but is also launched in particular ways by hooks’s lesser-known 1983 dissertation on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula. What becomes integral to hook’s transgressive thought is a critique of how black womanhood attends to keeping a hold on life, transgressively confronting the interdisciplinarity of white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.

Speaking the Unspeakable. bell hooks’ Living Political Discourse

Paola Rudan — 2023-03-06

Focusing on a historical and critical reading of bell hook’s work, the essay analyzes the feminist problem of the interconnection of sex, race and class in contemporary neoliberal society. hooks’ understanding of the ideological function of mass media highlights the link between representation and social reproduction, which is in turn critical for grasping the tension between the politicization and commodification of identities. On this analytical basis, the "margin” emerges as an epistemic and political stance, which allows us to both understand the polemical function of history and memory and to regard feminism as a politics of articulation.