by bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains
South End Press
2006
SKU: 9780896087590
Mainstream media has made a concerted effort to polarize African Americans and Latinos, emphasizing differences in culture, religion, and values. In Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, two revolutionary thinkers invite us to reexamine and challenge this politically popular binary.
As renowned thinker and writer bell hooks and MacArthur Award-winning artist Amalia Mesa-Bains confront the challenges of building cross-cultural and cross-issue coalitions, they also speak to the viability of an oppositional politic shared by African Americans and Latinos. Listen in on the conversation as they share the ways their work, families, and cultural experiences have shaped their political activism, teaching, and artistic expression.
bell hooks is the author of numerous critically acclaimed and influential books on the politics of race, gender, class, and culture. Celebrated as one of our nation's leading public intellectuals by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader's "100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life," she is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world.
Her first book, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981), which she began when she was 19, was named one of the "twenty most influential women's books of the last twenty years" by Publishers Weekly in 1992. A prolific writer, hooks has published many other books with South End Press, including Feminist Theory, Black Looks, Yearning, Talking Back, and Breaking Bread (with Cornel West).
A frequent lecturer in the United States and abroad, her most recent books from South End Press include Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics and Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Updated Edition), and Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism with Amalia Mesa-Bains.
Amalia Mesa-Bains is a California-based artist, curator, and writer who has been associated with a number of pioneering exhibitions of Latino art, such as Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation and Mi Alma, Mi Terra, Mi Gente: Contemporary Chicana Art. Her powerful work incorporates various aspects of Chicano/a history, culture, and folk traditions and explores religion, ritual, Chicana history, and female rites of passage and the role each plays in the development of the Latina psyche.
She holds a BA in painting from San Jose State University, an MA in interdisciplinary education from San Francisco State University, and an MA and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the School of Clinical Psychology, Wright Institute in Berkeley.