Hue Woodson

This book provides a foundational study of bell hooks’s groundbreaking theory of the oppositional gaze, which is first introduced in her book, Black Looks (1992), by placing the oppositional gaze on Marxist footing for the first time. While situating hooks’s oppositional gaze within an intellectual tradition of the contemporary gaze emerging with French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, The Marxist Foundations of the Oppositional Gaze intervenes in the dominant accounts of the gaze, as it appears in and proliferates Western thinking, which largely overlook racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics. This book also foregrounds hooks’s oppositional gaze as an intersectional concept attuned to hooks’s conceptualization of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Through this foregrounding, Woodson allows the oppositional gaze to traverse cultural studies, black feminism, black studies, queer studies, and literary studies, putting the concept in conversation with how thinkers and scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Jose Esteban Muñoz, Toni Morrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Cedric Robinson have all theorized looking, subjectivity, and power. In effect, this book repurposes hooks’s Marxist theorization of the oppositional gaze as that which expands, retools, complicates, and transforms looking relations into a site of resistance and counter-agency, intent on questioning the capitalist moment.

In Ian Smith’s ‘Othello’s black handkerchief’, what arises from his reading of the handkerchief in Othello as a prosthetic black cloth becomes a means of subsequently theorizing how Black skin is signified in the play as a corporeal supplement. From Smith’s theorization of the way that blackness is performed in the early modern theatre, the theatrical significance of the prosthetic black cloth prescribes a way of understanding, in turn, the theatrical significance of Thomas D. Rice’s burnt cork mask of blackness for the nineteenth-century minstrel show. Just as it becomes possible to view Rice’s minstrel performance as intent on signifying Black skin, and how this signification is predicated on the prosthetic significance of blackness, which supplements Rice’s whiteness, Bert Williams’s minstrel performance also signifies Black skin, but, by contrast, in a way of theorizing Williams’s real blackness as a disability supplemented by the specific, theatrical implications of Williams’s burnt cork mask of blackness as a performative prosthesis. To this end, Williams’s minstrel performance, more so than Rice’s, allows his burnt cork mask of blackness to become a corporeal supplement to his real blackness, so that there are intersectional implications to how Williams consumes blackface, produces disability and casts prosthesis.

This chapter, as the conclusion, discusses white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as framed by ideologies, hegemonies, pedagogies, and rhetorics, such that each contributes intersectionally to the pervasiveness of racism, classism, and sexism in the proletariat experiences of black womanhood. In focusing on these phenomena, as each is articulated within the inherent, institutional constraints of a capitalist economy, this chapter considers how hooks’ “Black Marxist Feminism” functions transgressively against what are essentially capitalist ideologies, capitalist hegemonies, capitalist pedagogies, and capitalist rhetorics, in order to make it possible for counter-ideologies, counter-hegemonies, counter-pedagogies, and counter-rhetorics to emerge. What allows these transgressive phenomena to emerge is a critical pedagogy, which, in turn, allows for the emergence of the oppositional gaze, to the extent that the oppositional gaze both questions the capitalist moment and becomes, for black womanhood, a capitalist response.

This chapter provides a discussion of the significance of what hooks means by “the imperialism of patriarchy” in Ain’t I a Woman, as a theoretical precursor to what becomes white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in Feminist Theory. To do this, this chapter will make hooks conversant with racial imperialism (s), through Angela Y. Davis’ work from the 1970s to 1981, which becomes integral to hooks’ view of capitalism as advanced capitalism. What this chapter explicates is how, for hooks, advanced capitalism constitutes itself on the toxicities of racism, classism, and sexism, intersectionally imposed on black womanhood in a capitalist setting, through the capitalist relationship between imperialism and patriarchy. From this, hooks’ view of capitalism as advanced capitalism is assessed in terms of hooks’ understanding of imperialism, first, by placing hooks in conversation with studies on imperialism in the 1970s, and secondly, by having hooks hold dialogues with how imperialism is envisioned by John A. Hobson, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Schumpeter.

This chapter offers an understanding of hooks’ Marxian view of capitalism theorizes white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as a Marxian contract between white patriarchy and black womanhood, by theorizing the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal contract(s). To contextualize this contractarianism, this chapter considers conceptualizations of the “racial contract” and the “sexual contract,” toward framing the capitalist moment for black womanhood by the capitalist utility of their sex and an underlying historical-materialist significance. Working carefully through what Marx and Engels theorize as “historical materialism,” this is read into how hooks’ theorizes the relationship between the proletariat experiences of black womanhood and white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, grounded on a contractarianism about production relations, and as that which reveals, on the one hand, the human sensuous activity of black womanhood, while, on the other hand, revealing how white supremacist capitalist patriarchy expresses itself with social validity.

This chapter explains the proletariat experiences of black womanhood, as hooks theorizes in Ain’t I a Woman in terms of sexism and black female slave experience, devaluation, the imperialism of patriarchy, through theories of value about proof(s) of exploitation. Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, then, proof(s) of exploitation against black womanhood indicate the pervasiveness of the advanced capitalist state, point to advanced capitalist crises that intersectionally shaped the proletariat experience, and what this chapter refers to as the inherent, institutional constraints of a capitalist economy. What this chapter ultimately presents is how, for hooks’ view of capitalism, black womanhood becomes a form of capital for white patriarchy, oriented by three forms of capital (blackness, womanhood, and the body), which allow for, when placing hooks in a Marxian conversation with W. E. B. Du Bois, dividends for white patriarchy.

This chapter, as an introduction, attends to defining and providing the boundaries for hooks’ “black Marxist feminism,” and the extent that it provides an intersectional theory of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, by framing the distinctiveness of hooks’ Marxian analysis of the proletariat experiences of black womanhood. Given how hooks thinks Marxist thought, and what this ultimately means to her view of capitalism, this chapter considers how her account of the proletariat experiences of black womanhood, beginning in Ain’t I a Woman, directly challenges and theoretically complicates articulations of Marxist cultural studies in both the British and American contexts, black women’s studies and womanism, black feminism, notions of Marxist feminism. All of this will lead toward explicating what white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is for hooks, and how it informs hooks’ black Marxist feminism.

This chapter defines “the proletariat experiences of black womanhood,” as central to hooks’ view of capitalism, beginning in Ain’t I a Woman, and as instrumental to the way that hooks thinks Marxist thought. Placing hooks’ view of capitalism as conversant with a variety of articulations of capitalism, this chapter situates hooks’ view of capitalism as predicated on hooks’ Marxist theory of ideology, which, in itself, becomes conversant with a variety of conceptualizations of ideology, as a way of contextualizing the class-consciousness of the proletariat experiences of black womanhood. From here, this chapter explains how, for hooks, black womanhood’s class-consciousness and their proletariat experience are tied to a palpable economic situation. The capitalist significance of this, through a Marxian lens, allows hooks, in one sense, to think through systems of domination and racial imperialism, but in another sense, it allows for a Marxian conversation with intersectionality’s intellectual history and Angela Y. Davis.

This chapter considers the proletariat experiences of black womanhood as relative to an economic situation, as that which is invested in questioning the capitalist moment through racial capitalism and the black radical tradition. To further question black womanhood’s capitalist moment, this chapter places hooks in conversation with racial capitalism, as a means for understanding how the capitalist utility of race becomes, for hooks, the capitalist utility of sex, given hooks’ emphasis on sexism and black female slave experience. This emphasis is framed by the conceptualization of capitalist racism, which becomes, for hooks, capitalist sexism, or sexual capitalism, in order to think through how the proletariat experiences of black womanhood are indicative of the capitalist surpluses of exploitation, profit, and expropriation, toward what is assessed as hyperexploitation, hyperprofit, and hyperexpropriation, and then, as superexploitation, superprofit, and superexpropriation.

This essay is a critical reading of Native Son through the philosophical lens of phenomenology, which offers a means of theorizing black masculinity. It will draw on the thought of Edmund Husserl, employing notions of reality, consciousness, intentionality, and embodiment as conceptual tools for grasping Bigger Thomas’s complex experiences and perceptions in the fictional world of Native Son. It will also suggest how the phenomenology of black masculinity can apply to Wright’s subsequent novels, The Man Who Lived Underground (written 1942, first published 2021), The Outsider and The Long Dream (1958), as well as to the autobiographical Black Boy (1945),

This book explores bell hooks' trajectory of work and cohesiveness of thought about the meaning and meaningfulness of black womanhood in terms of a Black Marxist feminism, which uniquely confronts the dimensions of feminism and womanism; the relations between the secular and the religious; the problems of gender and sexism; and the structural and systemic issues of oppression, domination, white supremacy, and capitalism. In making sense of black womanhood in its philosophical, social, cultural, institutional, and historical complexities, hooks' Black Marxist feminism constructs an intersectional theory about what hooks describes as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In this sense, hooks' Black Marxist feminism conceptualizes the ways and means by which white supremacist capitalist patriarchy imposes intersectional predicaments upon black womanhood, drawing foundationally on Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, working within the purview of a host of Marxisms in Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Kautsky, Nikolai Bukharin, and Georgi Plekhanov, and speaking to the Marxist proclivities of Cedric Robinson, Cornel West, Charles W. Mills, James H. Cone, Stuart Hall, and Angela Y. Davis.

Throughout bell hooks's body of work, beginning with Ain't I a Woman (1981), there are two dominant, epistemological strands interwoven into the trajectory of hooks's thought: firstly, the oppositional gaze and, secondly, critical pedagogy. Ultimately, what ties these two strands together are two substantive acts of resistance, which make both the oppositional gaze and critical pedagogy possible: hearing/listening and speaking/voicing. These substantive acts of resistance arise through sonic pedagogies, insofar as what occurs through hearing/listening and speaking/voicing acts are substantively grounded in sound studies. In turn, for hooks, the very notion of sound—that which informs sonic pedagogies—itself becomes integral to the meaning and meaningfulness of the oppositional gaze as it is first evoked in Black Looks (1992), through the meaning and meaningfulness of hearing/listening and speaking/voicing. In the same regard, hooks's approach to sound becomes important for critical pedagogy—that which provides the scope of sonic pedagogies—especially as it is advanced mainly across three works: Teaching to Transgress (1994), Teaching Community (2003), and Teaching Critical Thinking (2010).

As a public intellectual, the earliest period in Cornel West’s academic career can be traced to his relationship with James H. Cone, just as much as Cone’s earliest development of black theology can be traced to his relationship with West. Essentially, when considering the mutual influences of Cone on West and West on Cone, this lays bare how both attend to social justice as that which is liberational-theological and based on prophetic commitments. Not only is this relationship essential to allowing Cone to re-imagine the task of Black theology in the late-1970s in terms of a scope that re-considered Marxist social analysis, but this relationship also proved informative for West’s conceptualization of “the prophetic” in the early 1980s, as that which fundamentally grounds a broader prophetic tradition and what it means to social justice through liberational theologizing. It is this prophetic tradition, for Cone and West alike, that attunes and is attuned by the meaning and meaningfulness of a Black intellectual life, predicated on the meaning and meaningfulness of the activism, religiosity, and the public sphere. While Cone and West both occupy important roles in what the prophetic tradition is methodologically, both significantly influence one another, through their respective prophetic commitments to liberational-theological social justice.

In the collaborative project Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) with Cornel West, when interviewing West, bell hooks traces “the roots of (her) own critical consciousness” to her early experiences in the Black church and with religion in general, to the extent that her role as an intellectual is predicated on “spiritual practice.” It is through this practice that hooks perceives her role as an intellectual as one that “links religiosity to solidarity with the poor,” in a measured effort that avoids what she refers to as “the commodification of religion.” To be sure, this form of commodification limits what an intellectual can and should do, when she views that role within the intersectionality of meaningful activism, critical religiosity, and the engaging of the public sphere. For hooks, an intellectual must be deeply invested in “the kind of compassion, love, and openness” necessary for inclusiveness in the face of increasingly exclusive practices of the Black community, ultimately employed in how larger society devalues and degrades Black women and Black womanhood. Because of this, hooks ascribes to an insurgent intellectualism that, while recognizing her own situatedness between activism, religiosity, and the public sphere, is contingent on a kind of process thought: her intellectual insurgency is always “becoming” and contains a phenomenological intendedness with moving beyond her ontological blackness and epistemological womanhood towards a metaphysical intellectualism and a deontology fundamentally inherent in it. She presents a Black feminist/Womanist thinking into an insurgent Heideggerian-like question of the meaning of being, as both a Black woman and a Black intellectual. To do this, her insurgency in the role of the public intellectualism is grounded on both Frederick Douglass’ notion of “a heavy and cruel hand” (1853) and James Baldwin’s belief that being relatively conscious means “to be in rage almost all the time” (1969).

Through enacting what she refers to as “a postmodernism of resistance,” bell hooks works out and works through a methodology of transgressive thought, through a radical rhetoric of feminist ideology. When mouthed, this radical rhetoric is significantly inaugurated in part by the well-known text, Ain’t I A Woman, but is also launched in particular ways by hooks’ lesser-known 1983 dissertation on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula. What becomes integral to hooks’ transgressive thought is a critique of how black womanhood attends to keeping a hold on life, transgressively confronting the interdisciplinarity of white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.

This dissertation gives an account of and expands upon Stacy Alaimo’s term, “trans-corporeality,” in order to reconsider the rhetorical situation, through conceptualizations of how rhetorical bodies become embodied and traverse one another in various humanities. From “trans-corporeality,” what arises is a “trans-corporeal rhetoric,” which becomes an interdisciplinary rhetoric that speaks to the futures of rhetoric within the boundaries of various humanities, involving notions of embodiment, materiality, corporeality, and what Alaimo calls “bodily natures.” These futures of rhetoric not only wrestle with what embodiment is and can be for rhetorical bodies in various humanities, and what sort of ethics and aesthetics present themselves in rhetorical situations of “bodily natures,” but they also consider genres where trans-corporeal subjects reside. The triangularities of genre, ethics, and aesthetics are grounded on what is materially significant to various humanities, with this dissertation concerning itself with two: journalism and Christianity. As they respectively appear in Kenneth Burke’s The War of Words (2018) and Michel Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh (2021), Burke and Foucault provide for two post-factum studies of trans-corporeal rhetoric respectively in terms of the genres of journalism and Christianity, the ethics of news and the flesh, and the aesthetics of the body.

Given the perpetual problem of the historical Jesus, there remains an ongoing posing of the question to and a continuous seeking of the meaningfulness of Christology. From the earliest reckoning with the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith, what it means to do Christology today remains at the methodological center of the task and scope of every systematic theology. Whether giving an account of Albert Schweitzer's bringing an end to the quest for the historical Jesus in 1906, or attending to Rudolf Bultmann's period of no quest culminating with his demythologization project in the 1940s, how we still think of Christology as a matter of questions and concerns with meaning speaks to an unavoidable philosophizing of Christology. In this way, The Philosophy of Christology offers both a particular history of Christology in conjunction with a particular philosophy of Christology, which assesses the theological contributions by a group of Bultmannians following Bultmann in the 1950s and 1960s up to what can be reimagined by repurposing Jacques Derrida's philosophical question into the meaning of love in 2002.

At the intersection of “the theological” and “the political,” the situatedness of the sovereign dictates the task and method of political theology. It is the sovereign, in particular, positioned between “the theological” and “the political,” that is responsible for existentializing what is theologized and what is politicized through the power of sovereignty. Through this sovereignty, the sovereign creates, defines, and oversees all the existential dimensions of a theological-political environment, especially with respect to exclusiveness and inclusiveness, marginalization and belongingness, and what is accomplished by the state of exception. To understand the nuances of what a sovereign is and how sovereignty operates, as the one that develops the state of exception through an act of exception, this essay will examine the explicit and implicit political theologies articulated by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, in an effort to construct Slavoj Žižek’s political theology from Schmitt’s sentiment about “the one who decides on the exception” and Agamben’s conceptualization of “ zoē ” and “ bios. ” From Schmitt and Agamben, Žižek’s political theology makes use of the dialectic and references to notions of symptom and trauma, which ultimately culminates in a religious-oriented understanding of the sovereign's act of exception as the “theologico-political suspension of the ethical.”

Though, generally, it is often suggested that Richard Wright's The Outsider (1953) explicitly carries the label of an existentialist novel, Savage Holiday (1954) and The Long Dream (1958) are also invested in Wright’s approach to existentialism, since all three novels represent Wright’s attempts to translate Sartre’s French existentialism into Wright’s understanding of what a black existentialism would look like. That translation, for Wright, is not just about interpreted his meaning of “existence in black” through Sartre’s “being,” or even about Wright appropriating Sartre’s equivalency of existentialism with humanism, but, instead, it is much more about Wright attempting to confront Heidegger’s “Dasein” more directly.

Existential Theology: An Introduction offers a formalized and comprehensive examination of the field of existential theology, in order to distinguish it as a unique field of study and view it as a measured synthesis of the concerns of Christian existentialism, Christian humanism, and Christian philosophy with the preoccupations of proper existentialism and a series of unfolding themes from Augustine to Kierkegaard. To do this, Existential Theology attends to the field through the exploration of genres: the European traditions in French, Russian, and German schools of thought, counter-traditions in liberation, feminist, and womanist approaches, and postmodern traditions located in anthropological, political, and ethical approaches. While the cultural contexts inform how each of the selected philosopher-theologians present genres of "existential theology," other unique genres are examined in theoretical and philosophical contexts, particularly through a selected set of theologians, philosophers, thinkers, and theorists that are not generally categorized theologically. By assessing existential theology through how it manifests itself in "genres," this book brings together lesser-known figures, well-known thinkers, and figures that are not generally viewed as "existential theologians" to form a focused understanding of the question of the meaning of "existential theology" and what "existential theology" looks like in its varying forms.

A Theologian's Guide to Heidegger provides a uniquely theological introduction to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, by focusing on not just the relationship between Heidegger and theology, or even the nature of the discourse that must occur between theological concerns and Heidegger's philosophical errands, but by precisely exploring how theology can use Heidegger's philosophy as a means of outlining the scope and task of postmodern theology. To do this, especially with the postmodern theologian in mind, this book considers the general relationship between Heidegger and theology, how Heidegger can be read theologically, while justifying why Heidegger must be read this way and defining the role that Heidegger must take in postmodern theology. This includes a careful consideration of Heidegger's early theological roots from Freiburg to Marburg by examining the content of Heidegger's lesser-known theologically-minded seminars, lectures, and talks.

In light of Martin Heidegger's contextualized influence upon theme, John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner engage in theologies that, in their respective tasks and scopes, venture into existential theology, following Heideggerian pathmarks toward the primordiality of being on the way to unconcealment, or 'aletheia'. By way of each pathmark, each existential theologian assumes a specific theological stance that utilizes a decidedly existential lens. While the former certainly grounds them fundamentally in a kind of theology, the latter. by way of Heideggerian influences, allows them to venture beyond any traditional theological framework with the use of philosophical suppositions and propositions. In an effort at explaining the relationship between humanity's 'being' and God's 'being', each existential theologian examines what it means to be human, not strictly in terms of theology, but as it is tied inextricably to an understanding of the philosophy of existence: the concept of what being is.

The existential demands of race speak to the necessity of conceptualizing what race is in conjunction with what it means to be human. Both meanings intersect epistemologically and phenomenologically, such that what race is informs what it means to be human as much as what it means to be human informs what race is. In this way, “blackness” becomes both the concept and the embodiment of what race is and what it means to be human. Theological anthropology presents a framework by which “what race is” as a concept can be distinguished from “what it means to be human” as an embodiment. This distinction is calibrated through a theologizing about God from the meaningfulness of “what it means to be human” beyond “what race is.” More importantly, this differentiation is respectively between “what race is” in theory and “what race is” in praxis as what it means to be human, to the extent that what becomes specifically existential in the meaningfulness of race is translated by what becomes generally existential in the meaningfulness of human embodiment.

The focus of this commentary covering sessions IX and X is Alcibiades’s “entrance” into the symposium and what his late inebriated ingress brings to the discussion around love. Following the speeches delivered by Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, and Aristophanes culminating in the epistemological and mythological expressions of the meaning of love which are followed by speeches delivered by Agathon and Socrates focusing respectively on the rhetorical and the philosophical expressions of the meaning of love, Alcibiades’s speech provides a unique elucidation that brings Lacan to acknowledge that Alcibiades’s entrance is essential. This commentary seeks to understand what makes this entrance “essential,” how the “experience of transference,” as a form of unconcealment, is embodied in the relationship between Alcibiades, Agathon, and Socrates, and the concept of love, through Lacan, as a question of the meaning of agalma.

At a certain point in his in In Defense of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek suggests that, particularly with respect to Martin Heidegger's relationship with Nazism, Heidegger took "the right step." Not only does such a proposition provide a means to explain the direction Heidegger took in 1933 as it has been infamously pinpointed in his Rector's Address as the newly-inaugurated president of Freiburg, but it also becomes a means to explore Heidegger's turn towards Nietzsche by Winter 1936/1937 in a series of lectures and seminar delivered up to Winter 1944/1945. This turn presents a direction that, as Žižek describes, points to a "domestication of Nietzsche," which arises as Heidegger begins to distance himself from his active involvement with National Socialism. What his turn towards Nietzsche demonstrates, if employing Žižek's proposition, is Heidegger's desire to move in a "right direction."

In Enjoy your Symptom, Slavoj Žižek’s notion of “trauma” is critical to understanding the scope and meaning of the “symptom.” This “symptom,” conceptually, is construed through the manner in which identity, authority, and phallophany come to bear psychologically on the meaning of being. Because of this, the definition of “symptom,” when viewed in a Heideggerian way, becomes an ontical representation of that which is oriented primordially. The symptom, as we experience it, is more than just at the level of its ontics, but, instead, has a primordially to it, which is only revealed through the presence of trauma.

Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed presents a set of rules about how to navigate the contemporary, digital world, when considering the sentiments in the book’s subtitle “Ten Commands for a Digital Age.” To be sure, through how he outlines his understanding of the contemporary, digital world, Rushkoff proposes a hermeneutical exercise, dictating an understanding of the human situation. Similarly, Slavoj Žižek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, as a film, aims to confront what is occurring in the world situationally that might not be understood in the human situation itself.