Site(s), Sight(s), and Memory: The Anxiety of Morrison’s Influence on bell hooks

Abstract

Abstract: This article considers bell hooks’ thought both in terms of sites of memory and sights of memory, respectively interested in the past and the future, or in antecedence and in posterity, and the extent that both impose meaning on and meaningfulness to black womanhood. What influences hooks’ approach to these sites of memory, as well as these sights of memory, is how she conceptualizes black womanhood, which is initiated by and sustained in the anxiety of Toni Morrison’s influences on hooks, through hooks’ earliest childhood encounters with reading Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula .