Belonging: A Culture of Place

Drawing on memory, hooks contrasts two formative homes: Her grandmother Baba’s home, which nurtured her understanding of beauty, color, and spatial harmony, and the house she grew up in, which she characterizes as ugly and emotionally sterile. Baba’s home taught her that aesthetics could be a life-affirming spiritual practice, rooted in attentiveness and care that “we must learn to see” (122). This domestic aesthetic was not about material wealth but about cultivating meaning and visual pleasure from ordinary surroundings.

Hooks critiques how consumer capitalism has distorted this relationship to beauty, replacing spiritual yearning with a desire for possession. In contrast, the traditional Black southern community emphasized the creation and appreciation of art—music, poetry, performance—as part of both daily life and political resistance. She places this cultural ethos in historical context, noting that African aesthetics were carried into the “diaspora” and became tools of both survival and protest. For generations, Black artistic expression served to counter racist assumptions that Black people lacked feeling, creativity, or higher sensibility. 

She traces the rise and limitations of the Black Arts Movement, which sought to link cultural production to revolutionary politics. While the movement helped assert the political value of Black art, hooks critiques its essentialism and tendency to reject aesthetic complexity or experimentation that did not conform to nationalist ideology.