Though it was derided somewhat by the mainstream, to hooks, Girl 6 was progress. Hooks’ vehement critique of Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986) was fully laid out in 1996 in Reel to Real but like poetic intervention, that same year delivered Girl 6 – Lee’s female-centred allegory of patriarchy and sexual exploitation in the shadows of Hollywood. In a panel conversation titled ‘Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body’, responding to an image of the bikini-clad Black and blonde cover star, ranked among Time’s ‘100 Most Influential People’, hooks had opined: “It’s what that body stands for… desire fulfilled wealth, fame, celebrity – things that so many in our culture are lusting for… Or is it the combination of all of those things at the heart of the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist Patriarchy?” It’s useful to recall this metaphor of “terrorism” as a visual device when placing into critical context future controversy – namely, a scorchingly unfiltered take on the star power of the global phenomenon Beyoncé, expressed by hooks in her residency at the New School in May 2014. Dissent, and “it is dismissed as your problem”. In the pages of BFB, hooks would warn against the trickier duplicities of political correctness – specifically when deployed to silence, subvert and “mindf *ck” (hooks’ precise wording) the aesthetically marginalised into “the worst kind of mental terrorism”. Writing in the Village Voice in 1991, the infamous contrarian critic Armond White posited the notion that “a generation of new Black filmmakers badly needs a generation of film reviewers not enslaved to Hollywood orthodoxy… If there are filmmakers with the guts or inspiration to put a frame around their individual view of the world – it may require a compatible critic who has a cultural head start to accurately describe the effort” – the moment signifying “too crucial a period in American cultural history to be left to fools”. As the writer Andrea Stuart framed it, “by integrating the personal with cultural criticism”, hooks collapsed traditional boundaries between the academy, autobiography, film and feminist theory. The emergence of hooks in the late 1970s as a defiant young scholar and public intellectual, as attuned to the complexities of urban popular culture as to her working-class Southern familial roots, grounded her aspirations.

From Baldwin to bell hooks, there is an enduring continuum a tradition of radical Black aesthetic intervention from margin to centre.

Reel to reel bell hooks