"All these 6 weeks of bell hooks being in Utrecht is a moment of beginning"

Well, I think we always have to recognise that we can’t just expect the 6 weeks I spent in Utrecht as the first guest-professor in black feminist theory to be the moment of transformation. All these 6 weeks of bell hooks being in Utrecht is a moment of beginning

Former Belle van Zuylen professor Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, has died aged 69 in the United States. bell hooks taught at Utrecht University in 1992 and delivered her inaugural lecture may 15, 1992 entitled Feminism: theory as liberatory practice

The interview above was conducted at the occasion of bell hooks’ appointment as a Belle van Zuylen professor at what was then called the department of Women’s Studies in the Arts at Utrecht University. bell hooks then was an upcoming  and pioneering feminist scholar, one of the first academics to focus on the representation and reproduction of cultural images of blackness and gender in contemporary cultural discourses including movies, music and literature. Her then recent publication Yearning, Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (1990) made her the perfect guest-professor for the young ambitious Women’s Studies Programme in the Arts.

The programme nominated her as a candidate for the Belle van Zuylen chair to the UU BoS : Catalogus Professorum.

“Following her own definition, it might be comforting to think about bell hooks  and the impact of her work as a moment of beginning”, says Prof. Rosemarie Buikema, the current chair of the UU Gender Studies programme. “At least she epitomized this new beginning for us as young feminist scholars in the process of building a new programme and while doing so being fully aware of the necessity to engage with critical race and whiteness studies as well as with intersectional analysis”.