Random Intel: Bell Hooks, Postmodern Blackness
couple spot-on excerpts from bell hooks, postmodern blackness:
[8] Writing about blacks and postmodernism, Cornel West describes our collective plight:
There is increasing class division and differentiation, creating on the one hand a significant black middle-class, highly anxiety- ridden, insecure, willing to be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be, concerned with racism to the degree that it poses constraints on upward social mobility (ed. note: this is me!) ; and, on the other, a vast and growing black underclass, an underclass that embodies a kind of walking nihilism of pervasive drug addiction, pervasive alcoholism, pervasive homicide, and an exponential rise in suicide (ed. note: also me! holla!). Now because of the deindustrialization, we also have a devastated black industrial working class. We are talking here about tremendous hopelessness.
[15] Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent ruptures, surfaces, contextuality and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined to narrow, separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of every day. Much postmodern engagement with culture emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression and aesthetics, that inform the daily life of a mass population as well as writers and scholars. On the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics. One can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there for critical exchange. It’s exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular culture, because this may very well be “the” central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur. (ed. note: this part, coming soon!)
—
she published this in 1990, but seems prescient w/r/t blogs etc…. bell hooks had a vision, and the vision was NEGROPEDIA
