SOURCE: "Left Hooks," in Art Forum, Vol. XXXI, No. 5, January, 1993, pp. 10-11.

In the following review, Coleman discusses hooks's attempt to "decolonize" the minds of African Americans in Black Looks: Race and Representation.

We have to change our own mind…. We've got to change our own minds about each other. We have to see each other with new eyes. We have to come together with warmth.

                                —Malcolm X

Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life.

                                  —bell hooks

A call to action is different in 1992: the tactic is a privately owned liberation theology, the faith Blackness, the patron saint Vision. In her latest book of essays [Black Looks], cultural critic bell hooks gives up the quotidian for the spooky no-man's-land of mass-media representation...