bell hooks all about love barnes and noble

I saw in the email an opportunity to broaden my community beyond the rowan berry tree in the back yard of my new flat. I might have managed to move my body, but the heart takes its own time to cover distances… I remember distinctly receiving an email about a new pedagogical reading circle on bell hooks’ work Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, in my Outlook, and reading it line by line, as immigrant scholars tend to do when they first join a Western university, for fear of any correspondence that directs us to pack our bags and return home, even long after all legal formalities have been covered (part of it is wishful thinking about returning home that never quite leaves). Hooks urges us to change ‘love’ from an oft-used noun to a rarely understood verb this is not just a semantic move, but a shift away from lovelessness towards an ethic of love.Īs social distancing rendered my usual methods of building community – finding my favourite new café, and befriending someone who has “never left” town – relatively impossible, I wanted desperately to heal the emotional distancing that bloomed within me. Little did I know that my hopes of starting a new life, amid the paralysing loss of life and its meaning brought on by a life-threatening virus, would take away the one guarantee that those of us who leave homes too often always rely upon: the promise of new community that awaits us when we reach. I moved my body through endless medical and security barricades to start my doctoral studies in Scotland in 2020. I came to bell hooks thirsty for community.

Bell hooks all about love barnes and noble