AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES: BELL HOOKS, BARBARA CHRISTIAN, AND PATRICIA
WILLIAMS
What's here
1. In "Postmodern Blackness," hooks says that "racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with gut-level experience conceived as either opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory" (280). Do you agree? How often do you think blackness is associated with "gut-level experience" and opposed to "abstract thinking" and "theorizing"?
2. Does hooks have a remedy for the problems she's diagnosed in "Postmodern Blackness"? What does she want theorists to do--and to stop doing?
3. Throughout "Gangsta Culture," hooks speaks about the ways in which rap music and rap culture are portrayed in the mainstream (i.e., white) media. Do you agree that rap is usually constructed as marginal, deviant, and fundamentally at odds with mainstream culture? Do you agree that gangsta rap actually reflects the prevailing values of white American society? If so, why do you suppose hooks's view of rap culture hasn't become the dominant view? She wrote this essay about four years ago, so her ideas have had a chance to catch on . . .
4. How would you update hooks's essay? Instead of talking about The Piano, what more recent movie or TV show would you bring up? The English Patient, perhaps? (Just throwing that out--I haven't seen it yet.)
Questions on Barbara Christian
1. As you may know, it has become more and more common for academics to speak from personal experience. How are you affected by Christian's stories about her daughter, brother, and father? Do those stories strengthen her essay or weaken it? Do they help you to see the consequences of the UC Regents' decision to "kill" affirmative action? Do they help you to understand what she means when she talks about "the psychological battering of race" (123)?
2. Christian thinks that "it is the intersections of differences rather than one single difference that is always at work [in our lives]" (124). She is not alone in this thought, of course: in fact, a concern with the intersections of multiple differences might be described as the dominant concern of mid- and late-1990s theory and criticism. How does Christian see the differences of race, class, and gender intersecting in her own life? How do you see those things intersecting in your lives?
Questions on Patricia Williams
1. You'll notice, I'm sure, that Williams never engages the question that so many others have asked about O. J.: Did he do it? Why do you think she avoids that question? Do you feel that it's irresponsible of her to avoid it? Finally, what does her avoidance of the question allow her to do, to talk about, instead?
2. Williams begins by talking about the "too-familiar squeeze" that black feminists felt after the O. J. verdict. It's obvious that Williams considers the "squeeze" unfair and demeaning--but we'll still need to talk about her way of countering it. How does she, in the course of this essay, resist the pressure to speak either "as a woman" or "as an African-American"? And how does her discussion of class issues help her to break down the categories of "female" and "black"?
3. On page 276, Williams turns to one of her main topics: the "figurative disfigurement" of white women and black men. Why do you suppose she wants to consider those groups together? What is the point of her later discussions of Nicole Brown Simpson's beauty? Is she just trying to point out that beauty is defined according to white standards? And why, finally, does she twice return to the image of a Nicole who left O. J. immediately after the very first episode of domestic violence?
4. Were you made uncomfortable by Williams's discussion of the Brown family? (She seems to expect that you will be.) Do you see what she means when she talks about the idea of the "modern bridepiece"? Do you see why comparisons of marriage to prostitution might have the power to divide and split the feminist movement?