Hooks Bell - Breaking bread: insurgent Black intellectual life

In this provocative and captivating dialogue, bell hooks and Cornel West come together to discuss the dilemmas, contradictions, and joys of Black intellectual life. The two friends and comrades in struggle talk, argue, and disagree about everything from community to capitalism in a series of intimate conversations that range from playful to probing to revelatory. In evoking the act of breaking bread, the book calls upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life where people come together to give themselves, to nurture life, to renew their spirits, sustain their hopes, and to make a lived politics of revolutionary struggle an ongoing practice.

This 25th anniversary edition continues the dialogue with In Solidarity, their 2016 conversation at the bell hooks Institute on racism, politics, popular culture, and the contemporary Black experience.

A cultural critic, an intellectual, and a feminist writer, bell hooks is best known for classic books including Feminist Theory , Bone Black , All About Love , Rock My Soul , Belonging , We Real Cool , Where We Stand , Teaching to Transgress , Teaching Community , Outlaw Culture , and Reel to Real . hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College, and resides in her home state of Kentucky.

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is a Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has written over 20 books and edited 13, including Race Matters , Democracy Matters , Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud , Black Prophetic Fire , and Radical King . Dr. West is a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher , The Colbert Report , CNN, C-Span, and Democracy Now.

Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

bell hooks and Cornel West

First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2017 Gloria Watkins and Cornel West

The right of Gloria Watkins and Cornel West to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published
by South End Press 1991

All right reserved. No part of this may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: hooks, bell, 1952 author. | West, Cornel, co-author.
Title: Breaking bread : insurgent Black intellectual life / bell hooks and Cornel West.
Description: New York : Routledge / Taylor & Francis Group, 2017. |
"First edition published by South End Press 1991"Title page verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016045459 |
ISBN 9781138218758 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138218765 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315437095 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: African American
intellectuals. | African American intellectualsInterviews. | African AmericansIntellectual life.
Classification: LCC E185.89.I56 H77 2017 | DDC 305.896/073dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045459

ISBN: 978-1-138-21875-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-21876-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-43709-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond MT Std
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

I dedicate this book to all of us who share a vision of transformative redemptive love between Black women and men. Such love was expressed in the work between Cornel and myself... We hope that our collective commitment to love as an action and a practice will inspire and/or affirm passionate progressive, intellectual work on Black experience.

bh

To my beloved
grandmothers
Lovie OGwynn and Rose Bias

CW

IN SOLIDARITY: A Conversation

bell hooks and Cornel West

"In re-envoking a sense of breaking bread, we call upon the various traditions of sharing that take place in domestic, secular, and sacred life where we come together to give of ourselves to one another fully, to nurture life, to renew our spirits, sustain our hope and to make a lived politics of revolutionary struggle as ongoing practice."

Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

This conversation marks the conclusion of time spent with Cornel West in Berea, Kentucky at the bell hooks Institute for Contemplation, Critical Thinking and Dreaming. The aim of the Institute is the encouragement of dialogue between a diverse body of learners that celebrates and promotes critical thinking beyond academic settings. Bringing together scholars from a broad range of backgrounds, both in and out of the academy as well as ordinary folks, so that we can experience engaged transformative learning at the Institutewhere education as the practice of freedom is realized.

Supporting this endeavor without compensation (as did our first visiting thinker Gloria Steinem), Cornel West traveled to Berea to offer our community the benefit of his presence as teacher, spiritual leader, colleague and friend. Dr. West joined our Berea community and talked openly with us about politics and the meaning of social justice. Topics discussed ranged from sexism, racism, and the Obama administration to popular culture.

Cornel West and I first began our dialogue more than twenty years ago at Yale Universitywhere we were both teaching. Those conversations became the book Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. On the acknowledgement page, I wrote: "I dedicate this book to all of us who share a vision of transformative redemptive love between black women and men. Such love was expressed in the work between Cornel and myself... We hope that our collective commitment to love as an action and a practice will inspire and/or affirm passionate progressive, intellectual work on black experience."

Now more than twenty years have passed since the publication of Breaking Bread and we have both experienced many life changes. Joyfully, as Cornel writes in the preface to Keeping Faith, we have maintained solidarity rooted in the principles of a love ethic. It is that love ethic that informs what Cornel calls "prophetic criticism" explaining that it is "first and foremost an intellectual inquiring constitutive of existential democracya self critical and self corrective enterprise of human sense making for the preserving and expanding of human empathy and compassion." Later on, in his essay, "Cultural Politics of Difference," Cornel shares that "prophetic criticism" assumes that demystification is the most illuminating mode of theoretical inquiry. He declares, "whiie it begins with social structural analysis, it also makes explicit its moral and political aims. It is partisan, positive, engaged, and crisis centered." In my work and in my life, I have been, and remain, concerned with the unity of theory and practice. I have wanted always to live with integritywith congruency between what I think, say, and do. And to maintain integrity I have relied not just on my individual ethics, i have depended on the solidarity and critical feedback of like-minded comrades who also believe that integrity is an essential moral and ethical foundation for all struggles to end domination.