AlmallamA Review of Bell Hooks Postmodern Blackness

1

Name: Almallam Boujemaa

Master: SLCE
Semester 1
A Review of bell hooks Article: POSTMODERN BLACKNESS

This review deals with Postmodern Blackness, written by the African American
writer bell hooks who has been internationally recognized as a postmodern feminist and
radical thinker. Her writings have focused mainly, through a feminist postmodern perspective,
on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and feminism. This article was published in the
scholarly journal Postmodern Culture, Volume 1, Number 1, in September 1990. It is situated
within the writings of the new leftist critical movement.
In Postmodern Blackness, bell hooks underscores the importance of postmodernism
to black experience. She also criticizes both the centralized discourse of postmodernism and
black people. Postmodernist discourse, according to bell hooks, relegates the voices of
African Americans and their culture to the margin, particularly black women. bell hooks
essay is in fact an attempt to interrogate and redefine the parameters of postmodernism to
include the voices and the experiences of the marginalized African Americans. hooks calls for
radical postmodernism which should take into account the status of black people and include
the voices of the displaced, marginalized, exploited and oppressed black people(3). She also
highlights the necessity to bridge the discourse of postmodernism and black popular culture.
hooks expresses her criticism towards the attitudes of black people. She asserts that
the blame is not on the white supremacist scholars only, but black people also contribute to
the marginalization they go through. The exclusion of African Americans and their culture
from the discourse of postmodernism stems from their indifference to the relevance of
postmodernism to the Black experience. They plainly deny and refuse any involvement in a
discussion of a topic about the relevance of postmodernism for African American experience,
a discussion initiated by bell hooks at the dinner party as alluded to in her essay. hooks is not
only dissatisfied with the elitist white supremacist and postmodern thinkers, but she also
criticizes black intellectuals. She alludes to Cornel West to bring the dimension of class
struggle to her debate about the relevance of postmodernism to African Americans.
Postmodernisms critique of identity, notably the critique of essentialist thinking, has served
black liberation struggle in that it could subvert the rigid essentialist concepts and
stereotypical images about race and identity that are ascribed to African Americans. She also
contends that the concept of blackness cannot be rendered as one and unique experience that
fits all black people; she advocates that radical postmodernism should rethink and extend the
concept of blackness to include the experiences of black people. This inclusion, she assumes,
would effect a colourful culture, which will wipe out the unfavourable inferior status African
Americans have assumed.
In the same vein, hooks claims that postmodernism falls in a certain meta-narrative
discourse of modernism because the white male intellectuals dominate postmodernism and
tend to relegate the blacks experience, especially black womens, into the margin of the
academia, denying them any role in the making of African American cultural identity, and
creating a male intellectual hegemony. As a case in point, hooks refers to Andrew Ross
chapter Hip and the Long Front of color in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture,
in which Ross tackles the issues of black culture as if black women had no involvement in the
production of American culture. She also alludes to a collection of essays The Pirates
Fiance: Feminism and Postmodernism, in which Meaghan Morris gives a bibliography of
women she considers important to postmodern discourse which challenges the male
hegemony; she does not, however, make reference to any works by black women, suggesting
that black female readers and writers should interrogate postmodernism that excludes their
voices.
bell hooks urges African Americans to find new avenues for black struggle movements
to transmit their own messages and new ways to address issues pertaining to racism in
particular and the hegemonic politics in general. She maintains that postmodernism cannot
resist racism and the politics of domination; she recommends radical postmodernism as a
means to deal with the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and oppressed black
people. This radical postmodernism, hooks argues, should include what African American
artists and other people do; if radical postmodernism is to have its transformative effects on
African Americans, it should include their artistic productions. hooks argument converges
with Robert Storrs
ideas in his Art in America in which he asserts that radical
postmodernism should be directed primarily to what non-white artists and people outside the
mainstream might be doing. hooks alludes to rap music as an aspect and an only critical
medium via which African Americans have expressed their voice and culture.
In a nutshell, hooks underscores the importance of connecting elitist postmodernism
and African American experience and popular culture so as to set up a new school line of
thought called radical postmodernism which contests the centralised discourse of
postmodernism. She cites Grossbergs essay Putting the Pop Back into Postmodernism to
back up her contention that popular culture and postmodernism are connected. Further, she
claims that lower class popular culture should be incorporated within the philosophical
boundaries of postmodernism so that racism can be treated critically, and that postmodern
knowledge can be shared with African Americans so as to empower their consciousness to
take part in a meaningful struggle for liberation.
bell hooks essay Postmodern Blackness provides a firm and coherent critical
background that interrogates the totalizing and essentialsing discourses. This critical
background can be valuable to marginalised, oppressed, and once-colonised groups to resist
the rigid conceptualization of identity, race, gender, and culture projected on them. It further
offers an opportunity to all marginalized groups to reconsider the dynamics of the group itself
through acknowledging that difference exists even within the seemingly coherent group.

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1

Name: Almallam Boujemaa

A Review of bell hooks Article: POSTMODERN BLACKNESS

ideas in his Art in America in which he asserts that radical

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