 | | The writer bell hooks, in 1996. "I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what was happening around and within me," she once wrote.Karjean Levine/Getty Images |
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The Wide-Angle Vision, and Legacy, of bell hooks |
The news that bell hooks had died at 69 spread quickly across social media on Wednesday, prompting a flood of posts featuring favorite quotes about love, justice, men, women, community and healing, as well as testimonials about how this pioneering Black feminist writer had changed, or saved, lives. |
If the outpouring felt more intense than the usual tributes to departed scholars, admirers say that merely reflected the extraordinary way she mixed the emotional with the intellectual in her quest to make the experiences of Black women not just visible, but central to a sweeping reimagining of society. |
"I think we can't overstate her influence," Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton said. "For so many people, bell hooks was their first introduction to social theory, critiques of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism." |
But even more, she said, hooks's writing — and her impact — was personal. |
"She came from this really sophisticated world of cultural theory, but she connected it to her very particular experience of growing up in Jim Crow Kentucky," Perry said. "She had all the chops to write in this more traditional, drier academic style, but she chose differently because she wanted to connect with everyday people." |
Perry first met hooks in the early 1990s. She was working as an intern at South End Press, which had published "Ain't I a Woman," hooks's groundbreaking 1981 book about the impact of both racism and sexism on Black women. |
It was a book about intersectionality, before there was a word for it — just one example of how the more than 30 books she wrote anticipated debates and concepts, from self-care to cultural appropriation, that are mainstays today. |
Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989, said that hooks's work gave theoretical ballast to political organizing that was happening on the ground. It helped make it possible to critique both white-led feminism and the male-dominated antiracism movement "without feeling like a traitor." |
"Sometimes people say things, or write things, that so capture your experience that you forget never not knowing it or thinking it," Crenshaw said. "bell is one of those people." |
"Ain't I a Woman," which hooks began writing when she was 19, was part of a wave of Black women's writing in the 1970s, from Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" and Tony Cade Bambara's anthology "The Black Woman" (both from 1970), through Alice Walker's landmark 1975 essay "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" and Angela Davis's 1981 "Women, Race and Class." ("bell hooks" was the pen name of Gloria Watkins, derived from the name of her great-grandmother, and written in lowercase letters to shift identity from herself to her ideas) |
In her next book, "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center," hooks gave a crisp definition of feminism as "the struggle to end sexist oppression." If she was critical of "white, bourgeois, hegemonic dominance of feminist movements," she also warned against using such critiques to "trash, reject or dismiss" feminism itself. |
In the late 1980s, hooks came to broader prominence in the heyday of a new generation of university-based Black public intellectuals, and she was the rare woman in a circle seemingly defined by male scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West (with whom she wrote "Breaking Bread" in 1991). |
But while hooks, spent her entire career in the academy, teaching at Yale, Oberlin, Berea College in Kentucky and other institutions, she was not solely of it. For her, theory wasn't an abstract exercise, but a tool for self-understanding and survival. |
"I came to theory because I was hurting," she wrote in her 1991 essay Theory as Liberatory Practice. "I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what was happening around and within me." |
 | | Vicente Fernández sang at the unveiling of a statue in his honor at the Plaza de los Mariachis in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2019.Ulises Ruiz/AFP — Getty Images |
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First Breakups. Final Goodbyes. Fernández Sang It All. |
After four years of dating, this is what it came to for Art Castillo: sitting alone in his blue truck in Waco, Texas, listening to his girlfriend on speaker. Long distance wasn't working, she told him. She had found another man. The relationship was over. |
"I hanged up and put Vicente Fernández on," said Mr. Castillo, 30. He played "La Cruz de Tu Olvido," in which Mr. Fernández bellows, "As I looked at the evil in your eyes, I understood that you have never loved me." He played it louder, again and again, until he was done crying. |
"With his songs," Mr. Castillo said, "you just feel it inside you." |
For generations, Mr. Fernández's often sorrowful songs have served as a balm for the heartbroken. Over a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Fernández, the Mexican ranchera superstar who died on Sunday at 81, recorded hundreds of songs and dozens of albums, singing of unrequited love, scornful partners and tarnished romance. |
In that time, Mr. Fernández, known to millions as Chente, became a beacon for the brokenhearted, a man to listen to when love has gone awry and all you want — besides, perhaps, some tequila — are plucky guitars, harmonized horns and someone to give voice to your most intimate feelings. |
"For a lot of people with Mexican descent, his voice is home," said Rachel Yvonne Cruz, a professor of Mexican American studies and a music specialist at the University of Texas at San Antonio. |
That explains why so many people, mostly Latinos, turn to him when they are down, she said. |
"When Vicente Fernández sang, he expressed all of those emotions that we keep held inside: that silent cry, that silent scream that's happening when you're heartbroken, when you just cannot anymore," Dr. Cruz said. "And when you listened to him, you were able to have that release that you needed." |
Who broke Mr. Fernández's heart? That remains a playful mystery among his fans. He married María del Refugio Abarca Villaseñor when he was in his early 20s, and the two stayed together until his death. |
But however and whenever his heartbreak occurred, his fans say, his anguish came through in his lyrics. |
Tu boca, tu ojos y tu pelo |
Los llevo en mi mente, noche y día |
"Your mouth, your eyes and your hair, I carry them in my mind, night and day," Mr. Fernández sings in "Las Llaves de Mi Alma." |
No puedo terminar con tantas penas |
"Because of your damn love, I can't bring an end to so much shame," he roars in "Por Tu Maldito Amor." |
En un marco, pondré tu retrato |
Y en mi mano, otra copa de vino |
"In a frame, I will put your portrait, and in my hand, another glass of wine," he croons in "Tu Camino y el Mío." |
That was the song that helped Fernanda Aguilera. |
"I had been with someone since, I guess, high school, and then you think, 'Well, this is going to be my person,'" said Ms. Aguilera, 27, of San Antonio. But when college came and they went their separate ways, she realized that the relationship "was just an illusion in my head." |
She played "Tu Camino y el Mío" ("Your Road and Mine"), and recalled thinking: "This is exactly how I feel, but I could just never find the words. And it's like he put the words together for me." |
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