She has published over 30 books and scholarly articles, in topics such as masculinity and patriarchy, self-help and engaged pedagogy, feminist consciousness and community creation, and representation and politics. Lara E. Skip to content Bell Hooks, November 1, Do you find this information helpful? A small donation would help us keep this accessible to all.
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Previous Previous post: Meharry Medical College Many stories in popular culture are also rife with powerful name themes. For example, in the Germanic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin and the film Beetlejuice , plot is bound up in the way names break a spell or summon a presence.
One of the most culturally and historically relevant illustrations of how naming and language is bound up with power and the exercise of dominance is the practice of European colonizers attacking, defiling, and altering African names in order to suppress and erase African identity.
For slaves, names encompassed their identities as individuals but also aided in the survival of a collective history. Despite this erasure, one of the ways in which enslaved and free Africans sought to preserve culture and identity was through naming.
The violence with which name, identity, and colonialism is embedded with slavery is exemplified in the novel and film, Roots , wherein the protagonist Kunta Kinte seeks to retain his birth name at the expense of extreme physical and psychological abuse. First shown on television in , it had a significant impact upon naming in the African American community. In fact, the history of the English language has always been tied to power and patriarchy.
This is most keenly illustrated in the following etymologies , tracing female-centered words back to roots which define women by their relationship to men and how they are useful:.
Words are not merely names or parts of a sentence structure; they represent a dynamic of power relations. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are connected to our relationships. How we communicate language is a social process. Ultimately, for Fairclough, awareness of language and how it contributes to the domination or subjugation of others is the first step toward emancipation. Though language is not the only site of social control and power, it is the most immediate medium at our disposal.
As bell hooks herself writes :. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear. We seek to make a place for intimacy. Why is it so valuable that it is to be capitalized? Down this path, i started thinking about names as descriptors versus separate entities.
Isn't a name simply another unique adjective for me? A label? I am not my name; my name is simply another descriptor of me. Should i weight that descriptor as anything more valuable than the other adjectives used to describe me?
Obviously, i care about my name - i've gone out of my way to change it too many times to suggest otherwise. But do i believe that capitalization shows the appropriate value? But that's exactly it - it's my name and i should be able to frame it as i see fit, as my adjective, not someone else's. Why must it follow some New York Times standard guide for naming? The words that i choose to describe myself should be framed in writing and in speech in a way that feels as though i own them, as though i can relate to them.
This is not to say that i wanted a unique symbol to stand for my name, simply that i wanted to write it in a fashion that showed the beauty of my mother's consideration. Of course, as i get older, i end up having a deep engrained individualization of my name.
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