I was very excited to work as one of the reading facilitators for Uncut Funk. I found the dialogue between Hall and hooks to be incredibly generative, especially to the way I think about how my personal life intersects with my intellectual work. Among other subjects, Hall and hooks discuss the notion of home and family. In this discussion, they talk about what enables us to leave home. For Hall it was race and for hooks it was intersectionality (though not labeled as such). Here is my question:
If we think of our disciplines as intellectual homes, what limits or enables us from leaving them, and should we even if we can?
In the second half of the text, Hall and hooks shift to a discussion about class, capitalism, and wealth. In this section, hooks states, “I have been increasingly trying to talk about class in my work, and a critique that I am trying to raise that I haven’t thought through enough is that among a black privileged class…is a complete unwillingness to talk about a life of dignity and integrity that may be lived in poverty. Part of what happens is that the privileged class of black people, as much as they may critique the Horatio Alger image, the notion of individual rise to fame, glory and economic power, also then participate in this same fiction by acting as though the only good life is a life that is lived in material plenty…There is a denial of the class narrative of values, about what the good life is” (113). Here is my question:
How can we (read: scholars) interrogate and expose the lie of capitalism (i.e., everyone can become wealthy) while we (read: society) are trying to achieve upper class status and “win” capitalism?
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