Insugent Black Intellectual Life

This study will provide a critical summary of Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, by bell hooks and Cornel West. The book is composed of ten sections, including an introduction, six of which are dialogues and mutual interviews between the two authors. Two sections are brief biographies of each author by the other, and the final two sections are separate essays by the authors on black intellectual life.

The book is a fascinating cornucopia of dialogue and ideas and insights related to almost every aspect of black life and culture. Uniting the different sections of the book is the authors' goal of creating a more inclusive and loving black community through the expression of their "testimony." bell hooks presents a concept of testimony which guides this book:

Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. . . . The believer stands before the community of faith . . . to give hope. . . . Although testimony is . . . personal . . . it is also a story accessible to others in the community of faith. . . . The purpose of testimony is not only to strengthen an individual's faith but also to build a faith of the community" (1).

The dialogues which developed out of that "spirit of testimony" form the bulk of this book, and the authors are quite successful in achieving their goal. It would be simplistic to reduce the book to one goal, but the various goals are all connected closely the central theme of expanding and enlightening the black community.

k minds and souls which make up that community is at the heart of every exchange in this book. This healing extends from sex to politics to religion-based spirituality. As the authors declare: "[we] come to you as individuals who believe in God. That belief informs our message. One of the reasons we believe in God is due to the long tradition of religious faith in the Black community" (8). The authors are forthrightly liberals, if not radicals politically and socially, but they maintain a traditional connection with the Christian faith which underlies the life of many blacks in America today. At the same time, they recognize that an open-minded and open-hearted religion does not exclude any aspect of human experience. They discuss, for example, the virtues of Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" album. hooks perhaps overreaches herself in trying to read more political intention into Gaye's lyrics than is actually there, but her comments are still useful in showing that popular culture should be taken more seriously than it usually is: For [Gaye] . . . there seemed to be the sense that there is a sickness of the body, sickness within the body that affects the body politics. . . . Gaye was trying to communicate to Black people that ther

Category: Psychology - I