Critique: bell hooks DOCX

Title	Critique: bell hooks
Author	Katelyn Hicks
Pages	2
File Size	16.1 KB
File Type	DOCX
Total Downloads	128
Total Views	630

Summary

Katelyn Hicks Critique of bell hooks’ “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” In this essay, hooks shows the innate power relations that revolve around and surround language and language policy. There is a hegemony of American English in the Unites States and hooks underlines many of the reasons and results...

Description

Katelyn Hicks Critique of bell hooks' "Teaching New Worlds/New Words" In this essay, hooks shows the innate power relations that revolve around and surround language and language policy. There is a hegemony of American English in the Unites States and hooks underlines many of the reasons and results of such an oppressing power imbalance. In "Teaching New Worlds/New Words," bell hooks reflects on the images, thoughts, and ideologies that were inspired within in her from the poem "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," by Adrienne Rich. This poem's language, and its line, "This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you," echo hooks' theory of the hegemony of English. hooks discusses African American slaves and their struggle to use English as a lingua franca with other slaves who spoke other African languages. In speaking English, the oppressor's language, with one another the slaves manipulated the language to their needs, to describe their own realities, and thus developed a language of resistance. hooks also discusses her personal struggles with balancing her linguistic roots in Southern black vernacular and the dominant discourse of academia. Another part of the essay that struck me was when hooks (1994) refers to how this haunting line of poetry was "always waiting to challenge and assist [her] (p. 169). I believe that those who are bilingual but whose second and not first language is English will find that English both challenges and assists them, a paradigm of linguistic caliber. Hooks (1994) is correct in positing that, "recent discussions of diversity and multiculturalism rend to downplay or ignore the question of language" (p. 173). Although diversity is being touted and lauded within academic circles, linguistic diversity is often...