Belonging: A Culture of Place

The ideological foundation of Belonging is grounded in hooks’s commitment to dismantling systems of domination. Her critiques are rooted in what she names as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (8), a compound term that captures the overlapping forces of oppression shaping American life. In this text, hooks pays particular attention to how these systems manifest in rural communities, environmental policy, land ownership, and cultural memory. Her work is situated within Black feminist thought, which foregrounds the intersectionality of race, gender, and class as it affects the lives of marginalized people—especially Black women.

Hooks critiques liberal multiculturalism, shallow diversity initiatives, and nostalgic portrayals of rural life that erase histories of Black resilience and exclusion. She is sharply critical of whiteness—not as a racial identity but as a dominant cultural logic that distorts relationships to land, labor, and community. At the same time, she challenges Black communities to reckon with internalized racism and consumerist aspirations that distance them from their agrarian past. Her ideological framework insists that true liberation requires a spiritual as well as material transformation, which she refers to as “decolonizing” the mind.

Throughout the text, hooks draws on the oral traditions of Black Southern culture. She uses familial storytelling and memory as primary tools of knowledge-making.