bell hooks will deliver the keynote address of MHC's Black History Month celebration.

On Tuesday, February 13, at 7:30 pm in Gamble Auditorium, bell hooks, a feminist scholar, poet, memoirist, and social critic known for her deconstructive analyses of race and gender, will deliver the keynote address of MHC's celebration of black history month. Her talk is titled "Salvation: Black People and Love."

Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, bell hooks, nee Gloria Watkins, came to prominence in 1981 with her book, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which Publishers' Weekly ranked in 1992 among the twenty most important women's books of the last twenty years. Hooks decided to use a pseudonym both to honor her grandmother (whose name she took) and her mother, but also because the name Gloria became associated with an identity that was not completely hers. By using "bell hooks," she was able to reclaim her voice and identity she has said. It is hooks's commitment to her ideas, however, that led her to decapitalize her name. Both the decapitalization and the pseudonym itself are attempts to take the reader's focus away from the author and place it on the content of the work.

Although she is mainly known as a feminist thinker, her writings cover a broad range of topics on gender, race, teaching and the significance of media for contemporary culture. Hooks's main concern is with black women, however, her analysis of black women's current situation in the social hierarchy necessarily comes to deal with race and class, as well as gender. In her later books, she begins to critique popular culture. Her book Outlaw Culture and her film Cultural Criticism and Transformation are dedicated to hooks's desire to nurture in her readers a "critical eye." Hooks is a prolific author. Among her books are Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989); Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990); Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992); Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1993); Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995); Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996); Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999). Her most recent books are Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, Second Edition (2000) and Feminism Is for Everybody (2000).

Although she is currently a professor of English at City College of New York, hooks maintains that intellectual work need not come from academia, and that being in academia is often an impediment to true intellectual thought. Hooks earned a B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973; an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1976; and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983.

Black History Month is sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College Association of Pan African Unity, with support from the Office of the President, the Office of the Dean of the College, the African and African American Studies Program, and the Dean of Students Office.

See the CSJ calendar for other Black History Month events.