Black Looks: Race and RepresentationIn the critical essays collected in Black Looks, bell hooks interrogates old narratives and argues for alternative ways to look at blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness. Her focus is on spectatorship—in particular, the way blackness and black people are experienced in literature, music, television, and especially film—and her aim is to create a radical intervention into the way we talk about race and representation. As she describes: "the essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert." As students, scholars, activists, intellectuals, and any other readers who have engaged with the book since its original release in 1992 can attest, that's exactly what these pieces do. |
Contents
| 1 | |
1 loving blackness as political resistance | 9 |
2 eating the other desire and resistance | 21 |
3 revolutionary black women making ourselves subject | 41 |
4 selling hot pussy representations of black female sexuality in the cultural marketplace | 61 |
5 a feminist challenge must we call every woman sister? | 79 |
6 reconstructing black masculinity | 87 |
7 the oppositional gaze black female spectators | 115 |
8 micheauxs films celebrating blackness | 133 |
9 is paris burning? | 145 |
10 madonna plantation mistress or soul sister? | 157 |
11 representations of whiteness in the black imagination | 165 |
12 revolutionary renegades native americans african americans and black indians | 179 |
selected bibliography | 195 |
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Common terms and phrases
acknowledge affirm African Americans Angela Davis Anita Hill assert audience black communities black culture black female black female bodies black female sexuality black female spectators black female subjectivity black folks black gay Black Indians black liberation Black Looks black male black masculinity black womanhood black women buffalo soldier challenge cinema colonized constructed context critical critique decolonization desire essay evoked exploitation expressed fantasy feminism feminist film theory gaze gender girl identity images of black imperialist interrogation lives Madonna mainstream mass media Micheaux narrative Native Americans norms notions ourselves pain Paris is Burning patriarchal phallocentric pleasure political racial racism radical black female radical subjectivity reality representations of black representations of whiteness resistance role sexism shared social society solidarity speak stereotypes struggle suggests supremacy talk terror Tina Turner tion victimization viewers white folks white male white supremacist white supremacist capitalist white women woman young black