Eating the Other

bell hooks
  To know the key points of bell hook’s
essay ‘Eating the Other’
 To be able to apply bell hook’s theory to a
Today range of media texts
 To analyse key texts in relation to bell
hook’s theory
  bell hooks wrote an essay called ‘Eating the
Other’
bell hooks  Explores the relationship between race and
media representation
 The commodification of difference
 Exploitation of the ‘other’ by a white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy
 Cultural appropriation
 Orientalism
 you are constantly told that your
hairstyles are too ethnic or too exotic,
that maybe you should think about
being more approachable. But as
soon a white girl wears the same style
they call it edgy and chic and they get
to change the name and claim it as
their own.
  The over-riding fear is that cultural,
ethnic, and racial differences will
be continually commodified and
‘Eating the offered up as new dishes to
Other’ enhance the white palate – that the
Other will be eaten, consumed, and
forgotten.
  Referring to the representation of
Asian and African cultures in the
media
 Link to notion of hegemony
Orientalism
 Exaggeration, distortion, imagines
 Arab cultures as exotic, uncivilised
and sometimes dangerous
 orientalism
 desire & food
 ‘anti-blackness’ in binary
opposition to the desire for
whiteness
 people of colour as exotic, ‘the
other’.
 fetishisation of black masculinity
 white people dictate the
relationship with ‘the other’
 fantasy out of mundane life
 black male performativity
 minority groups
become alternative
playgrounds for the
dominating race, who
affirm their power
 within commodity
culture, ethnicity
becomes spice,
seasoning that can
liven up the dull dish
that is mainstream
white culture.
 “trying on for fun”
 White elitism protecting
the status quo through
racism towards people of
colour
 Narratives in the
professional media are
narrow and often racist
Whiteness is
the standard
or norm
 In ancient religious practices
among so called ‘primitive ‘
people the heart of a person
may be ripped out and eaten so
that one can embody that
person’s spirit of special
characteristics.
 Consumption of
blackness for
pleasure
 it lets some people get
rewarded for things the
creators never got credit
for
 White cultural appropriation of
black culture threatens to
decontextualize and thereby erase
the knowledge of the specific
historical and social context of
black experience from which
cultural productions and distinct
styles emerge.
 capitalism encourages white
consumers to feel an imagined
intimacy with racial otherness via
exotic or primitive fantasies
which in fact reinforce the status
quo
 flirting with ‘the other’
 problematic because the people
appropriating the culture do not
receive the same negative labels
or have to face the same negative
stereotypes