Abstract
This episode is part four of six of the lecture series [HTA 29] on the ‘second leg’ of bell hooks’s Belonging_ A Culture of Place [2009].
Primary Source
(missing reference)
Guiding Questions
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Chapter Eight___ Explain the “representations of whiteness in the Black imagination and the causal histories which make this a direct consequence of white supremacy itself. How is terror weaponized in the Black imagination and how does hooks’s childhood home and grandparents, with Baba and Daddy Gus, provide a site of resistance for hooks?
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Chapter Nine___ What different roles did tobacco play in hooks’s upbringing?
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Chapter Ten___ Explain “backwoods” or “earthbound” sensibilities as fruitful practices for resistance to intermeshing oppressions.
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Chapter Eleven___ Explain the relationship between Black experience, aesthetics, histories of trauma, and modes of resistance in terms of what hooks calls “an aesthetic of blackness.” Why might this “strange and oppositional” mode of being reach far beyond just the Black community with its specific history?
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Chapter Twelve___ How did Baba and Daddy Gus teach hooks to be “strange and oppositional?” How did their eccentricity afford hooks a freedom to practice her own ways of being that were otherwise colonized out of her?
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Chapter Thirteen___ How do porches provide sites of resistance against white supremacy “owning” the streets and forcing, through hatred and violence, Black people to “go back inside” and not be seen? Lugones will develop this to her awareness of the problem of the white male “folding away” the others whom he depends on for his survival and needs to be met.
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Chapter Fourteen___ Again, how did Baba teach hooks to resist racial domination and white supremacy through artmaking? How are crazy quilts related to urgent, survivalist mentalities for practicing sites of creation and resistance against colonizers?
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Chapter Fifteen___ Similar to the last question, how do quiltmaking and imagination provide sites of resistance? How does Gee’s Bend provide a different set of practices and insights for hooks to draw upon compared to Baba?
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Chapter Sixteen___ How is writing informed by the specific place and culture of one’s upbringing? Which other writers and key ideas does hooks draw upon to articulate a Kentuckian sensibility in particular?
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Chapter Seventeen___ Who was Wendell Berry, as hooks describes him, and why was his work so important to her?
YouTube Lecture
YouTube: HTA 29.4; hooks, Belonging [2009]; Second Leg_ Ch. 8-17; Part Four.