In one of his essays entitled “ postmodernism and Black America, Cornel West clearly suggests that Black intellectuals “are marginal-usually languishing at the interface of Black and White cultures or thoroughly ensconced in Euro-American settings”. As a result of this, she exhibits her full agreement with Cornel West, a postmodernist black writer, who believes that black authors are in fact marginalizing themselves by not merging into postmodernism. In fact, bell hooks does not put the wheels of blame only on the white scholarly writers who exclude black culture, but she, to a higher degree, reproaches the majority of black writers who refuse to take part and address this topic. Related to this issue, she gives the example of Meaghan Morris’s bibliography which, though containing some of the works by female writers, is completely void of any one written by a black female. In this regard, bell hooks presents the reader with several details which further prove the fact that the presence of women in the postmodernist discourse is to be thoroughly under dispute. Furthermore, she asserts that this movement is completely overwhelmed by the white male presence which is extremely ignorant, not only of black male writers but also females. In fact, bell hooks stresses the fact that the postmodernist movement is wholly independent and negligent of Afro-Americans’ culture.

The negative reply of one of these people, the only black guest along with the writer, can be considered as the fountain hit from which bell hook’s fierce spirit has emerged to pen this set of pages that bears the task of defending not only the black experience’s relevance to the postmodernist movement, but also the close attachment of black females to this theory.

In the party, the author had a very heated discussion with a bunch of white people, presumably intellectual ones, about the issue of whether postmodernism is relevant to blackness or not.

Bell hooks (whose name takes lowercase letters by her own choosing) embarks on the mission of asserting the close relationship between the Afro-American culture and postmodernism by bringing into light one of her past memories in which she was a guest in a party highly overwhelmed by white people.

Bell hooks on theory