What does it mean to call a place home? Who is allowed to become a member of a community? When can we say that we truly belong? These are some of the questions of place and belonging that renowned cultural critic bell hooks examines in her new book, Belonging: A Culture of Place. Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began—her old Kentucky home.
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NEC's view
Belonging: A Culture of Place is one of our favorite works by bell hooks. In it, she returns to her childhood home in Kentucky and uses that personal ground to reflect on race, land, history, and what it means to feel at home.
What we love about this book is how it weaves the intimate and the political. hooks writes about belonging not as sentimentality but as something contested — shaped by histories of slavery, segregation, and displacement. At the same time, she insists on the possibility of connection with land and community, even within the fractures of those histories.
