Salvation: Black People and Love
"A manual for fixing our culture...In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process."--Black Issues Book Review
New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed visionary and cultural critic bell hooks continues her exploration of the meaning of love in contemporary American society, offering groundbreaking, critical insight about Black people and love.
Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans. Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships and marriage in Black life, the prose and poetry of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, the liberation movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, or hip hop and gangsta rap culture, hooks lets us know what love's got to do with it.
Combining the passionate politics of W.E.B. DuBois with fresh, contemporary insights, hooks brilliantly offers new visions that will heal our nation's wounds from a culture of lovelessness. Her writings on love and its impact on race, class, family, history, and popular culture will help us heal and create beloved American communities.
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bell hooks was an American author who deserved the capital letters she chose to spurn.
Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, she used lowercase as both an homage to her maternal great-grandmother and an attempt to keep readers' focus where it belonged: on her work. When she died in 2021, hooks left behind a lifetime of thought that was decades ahead of its time. In the heyday of feminism, when the movement claimed to represent all women equally, hooks revealed in Ain't I a Woman--written when she was only nineteen--how the specific life experiences of Black women were being marginalized. She never lost this pioneering spirit, bringing it to bear on more than thirty books of literary criticism, children's fiction, poetry, and autobiography, including the New York Times bestseller All About Love. A professor of English, African and Afro-American studies, American literature, and women's studies, hooks taught at USC, Yale, among other institutions, including Berea College in her home state of Kentucky where the bell hooks center was established to honor her work. Winner of the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, a 2001 nominee for the NAACP's Image Award, and one of Time's 100 Women of the Year in 2020, hooks left her mark in every field she entered.
