On Tuesday, February 7th, 2023, the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender here at Bucknell held its 36th annual Black Experiences Lecture. The purpose of the Black Experiences Lecture is to give various Black Academics the opportunity to share their intellectual viewpoints through the lens of the ethnic and cultural experiences. This year, the featured lecturer was Barbara Ransby. Barbara Ransby is a Professor in the Department of African American Studies, Women & Gender Studies, and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The title of her lecture was A Black Feminist Balm for Troubling Times: Revisiting the Insurgent Intellectual Praxis of bell hooks. In this talk, Dr. Ransby talked not only about her relationship to bell hooks the person, but to her scholarship and how bell hooks’ intellectual praxis influences her own work. She accomplished this by first identifying the main touchstones of bell hooks’ approach to feminist thought: love of oneself, the act of “finding your people and loving them”, and “with and for your people take action”. She relayed bell hook’s intellectual praxis to the audience as an “insurgent politic of scholarship,” which both emphasized the importance of the academic as well as the revolutionary in understanding how best to tackle the issues facing Black people and Black women and femmes specifically. She also described bell hooks’ praxis as a “feminist politic of love” and a “nonviolent revolutionary politic,” which focuses equally on content and form. As the audience learned more about how bell hooks approached her work, it inspired us to think more not just about the content of our academic pursuits, but their form and how what we do here in the University setting translates more broadly to our communities. Throughout the lecture, it became clear that bell hooks was a major influence on Dr. Ransby personally and professionally, illuminating the importance of bell hooks and Black Feminist Theory to our understanding of Race, Ethnicity and Gender here at Bucknell.
*Note: For those who are unfamiliar, bell hook’s scholarship in part referenced her specific desire for her name not to be capitalized, which is why the student intern has chosen not to do so here. It’s not a grammatical mistake.
– Jerra Holdip