Series Continues with Talk by bell hooks

Ithaca College’s yearlong lecture and discussion series, "Race and Its Meanings," will continue on Wednesday, October 3, with "Representation: Changing the Image," a talk by social critic, essayist, and poet bell hooks. Her lecture, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 7:00 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium.

Born Gloria Watkins in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the author writes under the name of one of her forebears. Using the pseudonym bell hooks --- with no capitalization --- is the author’s way of distancing herself from an identity she feels is not completely hers while honoring the unlettered wisdom of her mother, grandmother, and earlier female ancestors.

Hooks’s literary debut came in 1978 with the publication of And There We Wept, a chapbook of poems. Since then she has published memoirs, essays, and more poetry. A recurring theme in her writings --- black women finding their voices within mainstream feminism --- found its first expression in Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism and was continued in such later works as Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black and Killing Rage: Ending Racism.

The issues that hooks tackles --- black womanhood, feminism, the civil rights movement, classism, sexism --- are complex and inflammatory. So is her impassioned treatment of them. Praised on the one hand for her perceptiveness and insight, she has also been criticized for weakening her arguments with redundancy and doctrinaire Marxist rhetoric.

"At her best, she exhibits a command of various voices that range from subtle overlays of the personal and historical to a refreshing public forthrightness that stings," wrote a critic in the Women’s Review of Books. "Inevitably, the reader will cheer through one essay and scowl through another."

Hooks is a recipient of the American Book Award, given by the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Writer’s Award, presented by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

Future fall semester offerings in the "Race and Its Meanings" series will include an October 25 talk by Mary Frances Berry, chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and an Ithaca College distinguished visiting scholar in residence, as well as film and video screenings. Further events are being scheduled for the spring semester.

"Race and Its Meanings" is sponsored by the Ithaca College Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity, Office of Multicultural Affairs, and Office of the Provost, in collaboration with the Cinema on the Edge series in the Roy H. Park School of Communications.

More information on the series, as well as a list of suggested readings, is available at www.ithaca.edu/race.