The Radical Imagination and Abolitionist Legacy of bell hooks
To Carly Rodgers, who inspires and encourages me to keep going
I remember growing up in a family that gave me a lot of love. Often this love coexisted with violence, conflict, and abuse. For a long time, I grew up learning that love endured everything and that it was possible to kill and hurt someone in the name of love. “I am doing this because I love you,” they would say. But somehow, I knew that that love, grounded in a coercive logic was not real love.
Reading bell hooks, I’ve learned that love is a combination of “care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication” (2000, p. 5). So, how could I believe in a kind of love that was wounding me? hooks’ body of work taught me to demand love as revolutionary action. As said by M. Scott Peck (1978), both an action and an intention. I remember using my imagination to create worlds where parental love would not be violent in this exercise of memories. Worlds where we could make love the order of the day. But to do this, we had to abolish certain types of relationships and rethink ourselves and the world.
What I learned from hooks, by imagining the possible, has a name: radical imagination. By saying this, I am claiming the radical imaginative potential that resides in hooks’ work and that integrates her abolitionist legacy.
Throughout an extensive body of work, hooks has devoted herself to understanding how systems of oppression are articulated employing the term “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,”[1] which first appears in Ain’t I A Woman (1981). By doing this, she rethinks the classroom environment and systems of education, to analyze contemporary cultural mechanisms and visual culture, and among many of her contributions, we can also highlight her brilliant analyses of masculinity and feminist theory.
By doing this, hooks became one of the most read authors around the world. Since 1981, hooks has gained notoriety for her sharpening critiques and contributions to black feminist thought, masculinity studies, cultural and art criticism, and, above all, to many of the people who have been heavily impacted by her work over the past forty years. In this sense, we can situate hooks as one of the central thinkers for the struggles for social justice. From here, from the Global South, we read hooks as an essential reference to think about the classroom environment, alongside authors such as Nilma Lino Gomes and Paulo Freire.
For me, one of the hooks’ most important views, present in Writing Beyond Race (2012), is the notion that every movement for social justice is based on the ethic of love. And it is important to always say that the love of which hooks speaks is a political category, not a shallow mobilization of romantic affections. In this sense, I think that much of her contribution to political movements, especially black movements, is in the notion that mutuality is revolutionary and that it is only made possible through love.
hooks’ work is a work that invites us to practice, to transformative action, so it is a work of radical imagination, which is also the work of love, of creating the possible. I see in her production an inescapable desire to put an end to the world around us to make room for the black and indigenous worlds, whose knowledge could save us from catastrophe.
In a conversation with the philosopher and her friend Cornel West in 2016, hooks laments: “Rereading Breaking Bread [first published in 1991], I was disturbed to find that most of the problems we identified have worsened.” (hooks & West, 2017, p. lv). And then, West remarks: “Everything is so much worse. Much worse. In fact, much worse than we could have conceived at that time [1991].” (hooks & West, 2017, p. lv).
The dialogue between hooks and West expresses the yearning for change and their dissatisfaction noticing that 25 years after the first publication of Breaking Bread almost nothing had changed in American society. We are talking here about the advances of fascism, neoliberalism, and social structures that need to be abolished. hooks’ dissatisfaction reveals her abolitionist legacy. Reform is not enough, it is necessary to transform, significantly, every social layer of the world as it has been made known to us. This makes hooks’ approach anarchistic. This makes hooks a radical thinker.
Throughout her work, at so many moments, hooks expressed her criticism of black leadership (2001; 2017), of social movements that have been co-opted by neoliberalism (1984; 2001), of American cultural politics (1990; 1992), in such a way as to build a very useful repertoire for activists and agents of social transformation around the world. We are dealing with a legacy that cannot be summed up in words. In calling us to action, hooks did more than just write books, she created multitudes — she contained multitudes — of black and indigenous people who want to transform the world. And this is why radical imagination is so powerful.
The colonial project is a project of death and to break with its structures, we need to imagine otherwise and recover our anarchic imaginative potential that denies the slavery legacy it left us. Here, imagination is understood as the act of creating the possible, reinventing reality, and inaugurating new worlds (hooks, 1992). Imagination speaks so that the absent becomes existent and displaces what is given. Or rather, what has been given to us as stable. The world as it has been made known to us. We live in a world for which there seems to be no alternative. But, as Walidah Imarisha (2015) states, there also seemed to be no liberation possible for enslaved black peoples. And in that sense, we are the realization of the dreams of our elders. Of those who refused to succumb to the traps of colonialism.
Radical imagination is also an act of refusal. A rebellion. Imagination does not bow to what is said to be “unrealistic”, imagination remakes the world and has the revolutionary potential of, reimagining the present, inventing the future. When there seems to be no way out, the radical imagination summons us to create escape routes, map the catastrophe, and bring into the world what once seemed impossible.
Through her radical imagination, hooks is helping many people around the world to tell their own stories and to create new worlds. That is the power of the tools she has given us. And among many teachings, she has radically taught us that no matter how desolate we are, there is always a possibility to be built from the community. We are not alone. We are the multitude that hooks created. It is time to stand up and act.
References
hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. New York & London: Routledge.
hooks, b. (1990). Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.
hooks, b. (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.
hooks, b. (2001). Salvation: Black people and love. New York: William Morrow.
hooks, b. (2013). Writing beyond race: living theory and practice. New York & London: Routledge.
hooks, b. & Yancy, G. (Dec 10th, 2015) “bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats, and Loving Blackness”. Retrieved January 1st, 2022 from https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/bell-hooks-buddhism-the-beats-and-loving-blackness/.
hooks, b. & West, C. (2017). Breaking bread: Insurgent black intellectual life. New York & London: Routledge.
Imarisha, W. (Feb 11th, 2015). “Rewriting The Future: Using Science Fiction To Re-Envision Justice”. Retrieved January 1st, 2022 from https://www.walidah.com/blog/2015/2/11/rewriting-the-future-using-science-fiction-to-re-envision-justice.
Peck, M. S. (1978). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values, and spiritual growth. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Notes
[1] In a dialogue with George Yancy, hooks says: “We can’t begin to understand the nature of domination if we don’t understand how these systems connect with one another. Significantly, this phrase has always moved me because it doesn’t value one system over another. For so many years in the feminist movement, women were saying that gender is the only aspect of identity that really matters, that domination only came into the world because of rape. Then we had so many race-oriented folks who were saying, “Race is the most important thing. We don’t even need to be talking about class or gender.” So for me, that phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism and of patriarchy. Those things are all linked — an interlocking system.” (hooks, b. & Yancy, G. (Dec 10th, 2015) “bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness”. Retrieved January 1st, 2022 from https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/bell-hooks-buddhism-the-beats-and-loving-blackness/.
