Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life by Bell Hooks and Cornell West, Reviewed by Mary T. Sheerin

Abstract

Introduction:  Bell Hooks and Cornell West's remarkable and exemplary work is literally dialogic - joining in interviews, dialogues and intertextual essays their voices as they explore and invent contemporary versions of Black intellectual life.  Breaking Bread begins and ends with the idea of the oral, the improvisational and the histrionic as the traditions from which fertile Black intellectual activity emerge.  The two authors, one a Black theologian and philosopher, the other a Black feminist culture theorist - to inadequately categorize each - embrace the Black Church's tradition of call and response to construct variations on shared theories, to challenge each other, push one another into new terrain.  Their subject matter ranges from popular culture to Black nationalism, from loving friendship to Black homophobia, from spirituality and prophetic Christianity to Left politics, from Black male/female relations to Black/White relationships within the Academy.  In their images of African American leadership qualities, White insurgents too will find inspiration for their projects and practices: in the capacity for self-criticism, in allowing others to shine, empowering and enabling them, in collective solidarity, in combative spirituality.