This course focuses on the major writings and ideas of author, educator, and theorist, bell hooks (1952-2021). Throughout the semester, we will consider key stages of this massively influential scholar’s lifelong critical engagement(s) with African Americanist modes of aesthetics, epistemology, and literary theory to support sound analysis of hooks’ invention of ideas, theories, and paradigmatic frameworks encompassing her coinage & conception of terms such as, for instance, “diasporic culture,” “meta-linguistics,” “oppositional gaze,” “representation,” and “transgressive pedagogy.”