Salvation: Black People and Love [Hardcover]

bell hooks (Author)

Book Description

Series: Bell Hooks Love Trilogy | Publication Date: January 9, 2001

Acclaimed visionary and intellectual, bell hooks began her exploration of the meaning of love in American culture with the bestselling All About Love: New Visions. Here she continues her love song to the nation with the groundbreaking and soul-stirring Salvation: Black People and Love. Intimate and revolutionary, Salvation is a gift as provocative as it is healing.

Written from a historical and cultural perspective, 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, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou, the liberation movements of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, sexual pain or pleasure, hip-hop and gangsta rap culture, addiction, greed, or the failure of black leadership, 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 inextricable links to race, class, family, history, and popular culture raise one pivotal question: How can we create beloved American communities? Salvation is bell hooks's journey to answer this question-an offering for everyone who cares about the souls of black folk.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"The transformative power of love is the foundation of all meaningful social change," contends hooks in this impassioned plea to embattled African-American communities to embrace love as a force for change. Returning to the subject of last year's All About Love, this leading feminist scholar focuses this time on a love ethic that, she maintains, has the potential to undo the long-term effects of neglect, poverty and despair. As in other recent books on black relationships (such as George Edmond Smith and Gwendolyn Goldsby Grant's More Than Sex), hooks refutes the myth stemming from the time of slavery that black people haven't attempted to normalize their lives, citing documentation of familial love and strong community ties. Much of the conflict in relationships between black men and women can be linked, she suggests, to the sense of loss and abandonment arising from increasingly fractured black families; as a result, many members of the hip-hop generation mistrust love. Although hooks covers overworked turf in her chapters on self-love, her flair for crisp writing surfaces again in her celebration of black women's propensity for cultivating love in their communities and in her stinging arguments against the scapegoating of black single mothers. In the later chapters, hooks reaches beyond the theoretical to address various walks of black life. Her fans will delight in her array of cultural references, from Zora Neale Hurston, Cornel West and Erich Fromm to Eldridge Cleaver, Olga Silverstein and Lil' Kim. Despite recent criticism that hooks may have lost some of her bite, this book provides ample evidence to the contrary. (Feb. 1 Forecast: Though it won't defend hooks from the charge that she is rewriting the same book, this effort is more focused and potent that her last. Supported by an 11-city tour that will include events that play to her following among college students, this title should keep hooks's fans satisfied.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Feminist scholar hooks (All About Love), who believes that there is a crisis of "lovelessness" in the black community, continues her exploration of love with a different slant: she addresses its meaning in black experience today and offers a plan of action for "black survivial and self-determination." At the heart of the matter are poor neighborhoods that were once lively but are now deserted, a lack of spirituality, an emphasis on gaining material things, and the resulting collapse of community. Hooks also covers the issues of self-love, single mothers, black masculinity, heterosexual love, and homosexual love. She appeals to Martin Luther King, Cornel West, writer June Jordan, and others for words of wisdom in this well-written and informative work. Ultimately, she urges African Americans to return to love, the clear path to healing our wounded environment. A welcome addition to most academic and some public libraries.
-DAnn Burns, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (January 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060184949
• ISBN-13: 978-0060184940
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #949,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bell Hooks is a cultural critic, feminist theorist, and writer. Celebrated as one of our nation's leading public intellectual by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader's 100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life, she is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world. Previously a professor in the English departments at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks is now a Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of more than seventeen books, including All About Love: New Visions; Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work; Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life; Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood; Killing Rage: Ending Racism; Art on My Mind: Visual Politics; and Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. She lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing but not wholly satisfying, December 29, 2001

By 

Michael J. Mazza - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Salvation: Black People and Love (Paperback)

In "Salvation: Black People and Love," cultural critic bell hooks explores the significance of love in African-American culture. The book combines autobiographical material with reflections on literature, film, music, and history. hooks declares, "The denigration of love in black experience, across classes, has been the breeding ground for nihilism, for despair, for ongoing terroristic violence and predatory opportunism." Ultimately, she envisions a rekindling of "the flame of liberation struggle rooted in a love ethic" and reaffirms Martin Luther King's vsion of "a beloved community."

In the book's introduction, hooks is clearly positioning herself in the great tradition of African-American literature and cultural activism: she makes reference to Lorraine Hansberry, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, June Jordan, and, of course, King. Later in the book she goes on to reference many other comparable figures: Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, etc. Among the topics she addresses are the following: images of African-Americans in the media, single mothers, black masculinity, the role of gay men and women in the black community, etc.

hooks' project is admirable, and her prose is engaging. Despite the book's strengths, however, I did not find it wholly satisfying. hooks has an annoying habit of citing her own books too much; I know she is a prolific author, but I find too much self-citation quite unappealing. Some of her critiques are questionable; I was particularly disturbed by her harsh assessments of Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott King. And frankly, hooks cites so many different people and cultural phenomena that the book often feels rushed and shallow. Toni Morrison's "Sula," rapper Lil' Kim, the film "Soul Food," "The Cosby Show," Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, W.E.B. Du Bois, Clarence Thomas: the names fly by at a dizzying rate.

Still, there is much to admire in "Salvation." I was particularly impressed by her large-spirited celebration of black gay men and lesbians; she mentions such important figures as Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam, and offers an intriguing glimpse at the hidden history of black gay people. Many of her autobiographical passages also have the ring of power and honesty. Overall, "Salvation" is well worth reading, especially for those with an interest in African-American studies.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hooks calls it as it is..., December 1, 2003

By 

R. J. Smith "Eddie Girl" (Way The Heck Up North, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Salvation: Black People and Love (Hardcover)

Since I "discovered" bell hooks in college (sound familar?) I continually find myself enaged and impressed with her writing style, view poing, un-embellished intellectual discourse, and use of common language to put voice to some difficult and sensitive topics. hooks is a careful observer, who manages to avoid pointing fingers and "taking sides," instead focusing on the way systems -- not individuals -- create situations by which we are all trapped in roles. Salvation is no different. I found it a thorough and thought provoking exploration of the notiton of love in a historically fractured community. As a black woman, it would have been easy to fall into who's *fault* it is that love is an endangered species in black culture. I've read the blame of black men, other black women, white men, mammas, stereotypes ect...but what hooks does differently, and with the gentle grace of an explorer trying to understand without categorically defineing a large topic, is simply examine.

she offers up theory, evidence and most of all a solution and a call to action for us ALL to affect the way love exists in black community. What Salvation leaves is an uplifiting message that while we come from the fractures and fissures left by forced relocation, slavery and dehumanization, love is not an impossibility or a fairytale, but a real necessity in our lives. I also appreciated how hooks addressed not just issues of romantic love but parental affection and the need of a "love ethic" within the black community that will be our salvation.
hooks has done it again, and with every book she lays the map of the black experience from the eyes of a scholar, a woman and a black person. She does it so clearly, and honestly, without guile or resentment, that even non-black scholars can appreciate her viewpoint without feeling alienated -- my roomate and I talked about this book for days after I (initially hesitating for fear she wouldn't 'get it') shared it with her. Its nice to be wrong about some things :)

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars love is what we really need, March 14, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Salvation: Black People and Love (Paperback)

This is one of the most thought-provoking books I have read in a while. Though I purchased this book a few years ago, I only recently picked it up to read. And what a read it was....
bell hooks brilliantly explores and exposes many of the fundamental causes at the root of our society's, particularly the black community's, moral decay and self-deformation. Though written for and to African-Americans, hooks does not exclude non-African-Americans from the "call" to embrace and build a love ethic. She has certainly done her research and her book has encouraged me to do more of my own. I enjoyed this book from beginning to end and particularly enjoyed the way she ended with a chapter entitled "love justice". I believe love is the most transformative power we have and in this book bell hooks tells us how and why.