Belonging: A Culture of Place

As the author, narrator, and central consciousness of Belonging, bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins) is both subject and theorist, guiding readers through her personal journey of return to Kentucky alongside a broader cultural critique of race, class, gender, place, and belonging. A prolific writer and public intellectual, hooks authored more than 30 books spanning memoir, feminist theory, cultural criticism, education, and aesthetics. Her interdisciplinary approach and accessible style made her a key figure in contemporary feminist and anti-racist thought. In Belonging, she brings together elements of memoir and political reflection to explore how her identity as a Black, working-class woman from rural Kentucky shaped her life, and how reclaiming that identity became central to her healing and activism.

Hooks’s childhood in the segregated South, particularly in the hills of Kentucky, serves as the emotional and geographic foundation of the text. Though she spent much of her adult life living, teaching, and organizing in urban and academic spaces, Belonging documents her return to Kentucky as both a physical homecoming and an ideological repositioning. She revisits family history, childhood memories, regional culture, and spiritual practice to reflect on what it means to create an ethical life rooted in place.