As far as intellectuals go, author bell hooks outpaces all others. In her work, “Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism,” Hooks converses with Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. Spanning topics like creativity, power, and politics, the pair work through complex topics and present them in a way that challenges the reader and forces them to evaluate the relationship between minorities and our society today. The book’s overarching theme is the effort of society to separate and polarize both Latinos and African Americans, illustrating and emphasizing differences to create a “preferred minority.” With two views on the topic from both sides, readers can understand the whole story and decide independently.
Overview
Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism brings bell hooks into conversation with artist and cultural critic Amalia Mesa-Bains. Their dialogue moves through art, education, spirituality, family, feminism, race, and the institutional conditions that shape cultural work.
The conversational form is central. Instead of presenting a single authoritative argument, the book records two thinkers comparing histories, testing interpretations, and identifying connections between Black and Chicana experience without erasing their differences.
Major themes
Engaged cultural criticism
Criticism here is not detached judgment. It grows from lived experience and asks how art and ideas can intervene in public life, classrooms, communities, and institutions.
Solidarity across difference
hooks and Mesa-Bains explore the possibilities and difficulties of coalition. Their exchange models solidarity as an active practice of listening, disagreement, memory, and shared work.
Art, home, and spirituality
Both speakers treat domestic spaces, family histories, ritual, and creative practice as sources of knowledge. The title’s idea of the “homegrown” challenges hierarchies that recognize expertise only when institutions authorize it.
Book details
| Full title | Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism |
|---|---|
| Authors | bell hooks and Amalia Mesa-Bains |
| Form | Critical dialogue |
| Edition record | The local catalog does not identify a verified ISBN, publisher, publication date, format, or page count for the linked edition. |
| Language | English |
How to approach the book
Read the exchanges as a developing conversation rather than a textbook organized around one thesis. Tracking where the speakers converge and where their histories produce different emphases reveals much of the book’s value.
Related reading
Art on My Mind extends hooks’ visual criticism, while Belonging examines place and memory. Uncut Funk offers another sustained intellectual dialogue, and Writing Beyond Race continues the question of building transformative relationships across difference.
Who should read it?
The book will be especially useful to artists, educators, cultural-studies readers, and people interested in Black and Chicana feminist dialogue.
My review from thinkgirl.net: Homegrown records a wise, poetic, and revolutionary conversation between Bell Hooks, a renowned African-American writer on sexism and racism, and award-winning Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains. Traversing such topics as family, spirituality, art, activism, immigration, multiculturalism, education, and death, their chat challenges the divide between African-American women and Latinas.
Excellent cultural criticism by two scholars of color regarding race, class, immigration rights, and the continued struggle against white supremacy. I listened to the audiobook, and there was one narrator for both voices; it would have been better if the authors had been allowed to record their parts.
It is academically fascinating and proves why we should engage with art and inspect our culture more to understand rather than follow the mainstream—one of the things you would reread for a college essay.
This was a thought-provoking dialogue that illuminated the shared experiences and struggles of African-American and Latina women. The discussions on art and activism were particularly enlightening.
When truthteller and careful writer Bell Hooks offers a book, I like standing at the bookshop when it opens.
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