Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

Rating:
Summary: Excellent! I can't wait to read more!
Review: bell hooks does an excellent job in exploring pop culture and its relationship to African Americans. I found all of the essays interesting but was particularly moved by Seduced by Violence No More in which I felt like I was slapped across the face. There are sections in that particular essay that read as if hooks had had a personal window into my life! Other essays that stood out to me included Crying Game meets The Body Guard, Misrepresenting the Black Underclass, and Censorship from Right to Left. I recommend this book to anyone interested in hearing a powerful direct view on pop culture and its effects.

Rating:
Summary: Ouch!
Review: bell hooks does an excellent job in exploring pop culture and its relationship to African Americans. I found all of the essays interesting but was particularly moved by Seduced by Violence No More, Crying Game meets The Body Guard, Misrepresenting the Black Underclass, and Censorship from Right to Left. I recommend this book to anyone interested in hearing a powerful direct view on pop culture and its effects.

Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: bell hooks is amazing. having read other books by her, I especially enjoyed this one for its relevance to current social issues. a must read.

Rating:
Summary: Revolutionary, compassionate, furious, and hopeful
Review: bell hooks's speaks to us, elegantly, clearly, and passionately about the culture of the margin, about disempowered people and their culture. But even more incredibly, she cuts right through crap, and fearlessly breaks things down for us, articulating truths, hopes and dreams I have never seen discussed anywhere else. bell hooks uses her keen intellect and her brilliant common sense to examine not only the materialistic and physical constraints of racist and sexist oppression, she also identifies the psychological, spiritual and emotional; individual and communal injury and trauma that is experienced. Then, she gives us hope, for revolution, for decolonization, not just of our bodies, but our minds and hearts. Reading bell hooks, for me, is like listening to an incredibly wise and gentle girlfriend, who can both hold your hand, and beat the living hell out of anyone trying to do you wrong.

Rating:
Summary: A very indepth medium to connect reality with proposition
Review: I came across bell hooks very recently. I have found her work to be very direct and very, very challenging. Resisting Reresentations has done a lot of things to my mind. Although I consider myself "in-the-now" with ideas on social issues, after reading this book I am left with a feeling of re-birth. hooks speaks of many issues I agree with (and some I am not so sure I swallow completely). These issues and hooks' analysis of them has made me learn to laterally think and critically observe our world. I am a woman who believes in the eradication of sexism on all levels but now I must make my belief the engine to keep the eradication machine existent. Any woman, or man, who needs inspiration to challenge the many institutions that support racism, sexism and captalism start with bell hooks. She forces you to use your brain and think. This is a quality that many intellectualists fail to possess.

Rating:
Summary: Things that lurk below the surface...
Review: This is certainly one amazing book. bell hooks superbly crafts her argument to truly make her readers think, to make them look at seemingly clear-cut issues in a different light. hooks shows very convincingly that there are many issues below the surface that we must explore if we are ever to have true equity and equality in our society. She cleverly exposes some of the subtle ways in which the powers that be maintain their power, sometimes deliberately, sometimes unwittingly, and she shows how the latter way is the most insidious one and does the most damage.
At the same time, hooks is not always true to her word. She demands for herself complete freedom from censorship but in her own way attempts to censor or at least discredit those women who might disagree with her. Second, I appreciate her condemnation of black violence, but following that with a "I condemn, but..."
makes one wonder about her true feelings. And in her essay on Columbus, hooks does exhibit her limited knowledge of American Indian issues. An excellent book to force readers to examine their own thoughts and actions but even better if people read between the lines and expose hooks' own prejudices.