While we were sifting through 28 years of BOMB interviews, we found a spate of interviews with African-American artists and thinkers conducted in the early to mid-1990s. Published in the wake of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, the Rodney King beating trial and subsequent L.A. riots, and just prior to the O.J. Simpson trial, the interviews offer us invaluable insight into what was a period of enormous racial tension and cultural upheaval.
Suggested Reading
In this 1994 interview published shortly before the debut of her book Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, the always soft-spoken but never complaisant feminist scholar bell hooks discusses rap, racism and language, and her belief that academics should break away from the ivory tower and interact directly with the general public. Hooks speaks candidly about the travails of putting her outlaw theory into practice, saying that she would rather subject herself to humiliation on the Ricki Lake show than reverence at Harvard or Yale.
You can read the full interview at BOMB.
โAdda Birnir
INTERVIEW:
Lawrence Chua: Recently, you were at a conference on black cinema where Stanley Crouch suggested that artists like Snoop Doggy Dog should be exterminated. How did you respond?
bell hooks: While itโs crucial to critique the sexism and the misogyny of rappers like Snoop Doggy Dog, it is essential for everyone to remember that they are not only more complex than the way they represent themselves, theyโre more complex than the way white society represents them as well. This notion that Snoop Doggy Dog defines himself โas he really isโ is something I reject. He clearly defines himself with a persona that works in cultural production in this society. The most discouraging aspect of that conference for me was this insistence on liberal individualism, as though peopleโs acts are disconnected from larger structures and larger forces of representation. Even Stanley Crouch wasnโt responding to my points. He was actually playing to those larger, mainstream cultural forces that reward him for saying really negative things about rap. I donโt believe it when people like Stanley Crouch say they are really concerned about misogyny. One can certainly read his essay on Toni Morrison and see incredible examples of virulent sexism and misogyny. I saw a continuum between the violence of a Snoop Doggy Dog and the violence of a Stanley Crouch, and I didnโt really see them as being separate and distinct entities. At the conference, I confessed that I have really violent impulses that sometimes listening to some panels I had wanted to come out and shoot people. The audience laughed, but I wasnโt being funny, and I wasnโt saying it to be cute or exhibitionist. I was acknowledging that the violent impulses donโt just exist out there in black youth or in the underclass, but that they reside in people like myself as wellโpeople who have our PhDs and our good jobs. But that doesnโt mean that my life is not tormented by rageful or irrational, violent impulses. It does mean that instead of shooting people, I go home and write a critique. My irrational impulse to want to kill people who bore me or whose ideas are not very complex clearly has to do with an exaggerated response to situations where I feel powerless. I think black people, across class, have many moments in our lives when we feel utterly powerless to change the direction of situations. And we donโt deal with this collectively because weโre so in denial about it. It is significant that the urge to exterminate was aroused by a moral standpoint wherein vulgarity must be dissed. This has a lot to do with censorship. Iโm not talking about mainstream censorship. Iโm talking about groups that claim to have progressive agendas, but also have practices of censorship, that involve their wanting to check people around crossing boundaries that โdonโt make our movement look good.โ There is a whole way of structuring conferences so that they end up being these celebratory events where a certain censorship takes place in the interest of maintaining unity. I see that as part of the colonizing mentality that says, โIn case white people are looking, we need to present ourselves as this unified nation so we canโt have these all-out dialectical exchanges where we show our differences.โ We need multiple voices that mirror our multiple subjectivities. Thereโs a cognitive dissonance between what is really being said by cultural criticsโweโre into border crossing, and cultural hybridityโand yet, when we come together, we still mirror the model of a unitary voice.
LC: How is your own work challenging those boundaries? When we had lunch a few months ago, you were about to go on a TV talk show. You said you were doing this because you werenโt reaching the audience you needed to start reaching.
bh: I went on the Ricki Lake show and it was a disaster. But it was a great experience. There are academics who do work on popular culture, but who really just do a lot of theoretical talking about popular culture and donโt actually enter those spaces that are much more full of contradictions, hostilities, and tensions. I heard those black folks in the audience at the Ricki Lake show saying, โWe donโt agree with Doctor hooks. Weโre not even going to call her Doctor. She doesnโt even know what sheโs talking about.โ I felt seriously assaulted, but at the same time, this was a different rage experience than sitting at home writing my cool article on the discourse of talk shows. To actually go there, and to participate, and see, and walk off the TV set because the politics of what was happening there were very disturbing to meโฆ They had told us that there would be a โspecial guestโ but they hadnโt said that it would be this Nazi woman. But I wanted to go on that show because Ricki Lake has an incredible number of black viewers between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, and those are exactly the people who are not in womenโs studies classes, or in cool cultural studies classes where theyโre learning about a Cornel West or a bell hooks. I used a quote by Snoop Doggy Dog at the NYU conference on black cinema, that really meant a lot to me. He said, โI donโt rap. I just talk. I want to be able to relax and conversate with my people.โ Are we, cultural workers situated in the academy, developing a jargon about cultural production that does not allow us to โconversate and crossโ these very borders that weโre talking about how cool it would be to cross? If we donโt find a way to โconversate,โ all weโre ever talking about is that those of us who have certain forms of class privilege can enter the low-down and dirty spaces and take what we want to get out of those spaces, and take our asses right back home. That is really crucial for the future of cultural criticism in the United States, for the future of magazines like BOMB, and the other kinds of magazines that many of us enjoy: Vibe, Details. How much are we conversating?
Read the full interview from BOMB Magazine Issue 48, Summer 1994.
Used with permission. All rights reserved. รฃ BOMB Magazine, New Art Publications, and its Contributors.
MORE LINKS:
bell hooks on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, February 15, 2000
Straight From
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