loving on bell: an altar
Introduction to remembering bell: reflections from Community Study
There was no one like bell. Born in Hopkinsville, KY to a working-class Black family, she became one of the most influential theorists, social activists, cultural critics, and feminists of the latter 20th and early 21st centuries. An ever-curious thinker and scholar, her expansive field of inquiry included oppression and justice, the intersections of race and class and gender, masculinity, education, community, love and care, and beyond. But it was her ability to offer critiques that were both scathing and full of love for the world as it was, towards what it could be, that was so powerful, deeply necessary, and so so moving to all of us who were touched by her work. She passed away at the end of 2021, as audacious and wayward as ever.
After bell's passing, the idea to honor and remember her through Community Study was an easy one; it felt immediately right to walk with our ancestor and guide together in community, in collective grief and love. Our first immersive study focused on the work of one writer/thinker, this community encouraged us to come together to explore the lineage and legacy of bell’s work across time. From early Black feminist works like Ain’t I A Woman and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, through her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood and the seminal inquiry All About Love: New Visions, to her well-loved Teaching trilogy, we gave ourselves space to luxuriate in and be challenged and nourished by her observations. Some of us were new to her work, while some of us had been carried by her before. But in returning to her words, we were able to mourn, learn, and heal.
Even when we disagreed with her, or when bringing fresh perspectives to her work that complicated her own ideas, we knew we were making her proud by affirming ourselves as worthy. By the end of our gentle, generous, meaningful time together, after hours of discussion and devotion, we all gained a new or renewed sense of respect and love for bell and her powerful, wide-ranging, caring critiques of how things have been. And ever gesturing towards what could be, "our foremother in keeping it all the way real.” We didn't know bell would be leaving us, but she left us with so much. Her work, her spirit, her love; bell always held and breathed with us during her time, in this form, with us on this scarred, giving, beautiful earth.
The reflections and offerings we have gathered here are all interwoven with lineages, with community, with thinking and breathing together. Suffusing these projects is the capacity, orientation, and practice of radical love, which bell attended to with such insight. Her multisensory rendering of her own life and her vision for a different world continues to inspire us, and these interconnected altars to her work are meant to honor and remember her: loving on bell, loving with bell, loving and learning together. As jaime ding reminds us, "love is not scarce; it is every day, it is in all of us, but nevertheless cannot be diluted.” bell loved life, loved her people, loved the world, and she did so fiercely, and with tenderness. And she demanded nothing less in return.
remembering bell: reflections from Community Study
“On Reading bell hooks and Community Study as Grief Ritual” by Marissa Arterberry
“How do you declare love is boundless on a billboard with such stark edges?” by jaime ding
“Can't We All Just Cathect Along” by Brittani Sterling
“Permission to Unpack: An Essay-Poem-Visual Response to Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood” by Jennifer Price
“I Remember the Listening” by Rebekah McFarland
Acknowledgements
Bone-deep gratitude to Jorge and Sofia, my co-conspirators in keeping Community Study alive; to Kristina and the other editors of up//root; to Jenny, for her ongoing support of these projects and spaces; and to all the participants and loving collaborators in the remembering bell study. I am changed.