bell hooks: The Last Interview and Other Conversations

The stimulating latest in Melville’s Last Interview series collects six conversations—spanning from 1989 to 2017—with feminist theorist bell hooks, who died in 2021. Speaking with sociologist Yvonne Zylan in 1989, hooks reflected on the contentious reception to a lecture she had given earlier that year at Yale Law School, maintaining that “a lot of the hostility that people feel towards me is that we simply do live in a world where women don’t often assert power, and that people get pissed off when women do.” Elsewhere, hooks critiques sexism in the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, arguing in an interview with Tricycle magazine that the Buddhist monk’s disapproval of casual sex conforms with “very traditional” notions of women’s propriety. In a 1994 interview for Bomb Magazine, she castigates gangsta rap for its misogynistic lyrics even as she “embrace[s] the rage... and the sense of powerlessness that undergirds it.” Other conversations touch on hooks’s ambivalence about her Kentucky upbringing, the importance of intersectionality, and obstacles to fulfilling relationships, demonstrating the incisive analysis of race and gender that earned her a devoted following. Wide-ranging and insightful, this makes for a solid primer on hooks’s ideas. (July)