The Black feminist bell hooks (1952-2021) was writing on intersectionality before it had a name; "I think that a lot of my analysis comes back to an insistence upon interlocking systems of domination" is how she distilled her longtime message in a 1989 dialogue reproduced in bell hooks: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations. This offering, from Melville's Last Interview series, amounts to a sampler of the ideas--sometimes prescient, often brilliant--for which hooks was rightly celebrated.
There's a gratifyingly wide range of subjects discussed in these six interviews, which span 1989 to 2017. One interview illuminates hooks's experience growing up in a working-class Kentucky household. Another interview spotlights hooks's engagement with pop culture as a way to reach people well outside the university settings in which she often found herself working. Another finds hooks proposing an unorthodox antidote to the patriarchal mindset of some men: "Personally, I think they need to be in therapeutic camps where they are taught how to love."
Hooks's interview with the Buddhist magazine Tricycle may offer the biggest surprise for readers who know her for her antisexism and antiracism work: "If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn't start with race; I wouldn't start with blackness; I wouldn't start with gender; I wouldn't start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I'm a seeker on the path." Readers of bell hooks may feel as though they are on the road with her. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer