ABSTRACT
One of bell hooks’s latest publications, a book of poetry insightfully entitled When Angels Speak of Love,1 encompasses two of the themes hooks has focused on in some of her most recent works, namely love and spirituality. Although she has acknowledged that love has always been present in her writings,2 she has devoted a trilogy of works entirely to the multidimensional essence of love and its social, ethnic, religious, and sexual implications. Aft er All About Love: New Visions, a general study of love, hooks published Salvation: Black People and Love, a book on the complexity of love in the African American community in the United States from the time of slavery to the present, and Communion: Th e Female Search for Love in which hooks explores the issue of love and women. Th is trilogy was followed by Th e Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love, which constitutes an analysis of the workings of love-or its absence-in the lives of men within a patriarchal system. It is out of the need for an inexistent critical research on the subject of love that hooks endeavors to explore the reasons that have led to a generalized absence and devaluation of love in U.S. society. Likewise, she advocates the implementation of a love ethic conducive to the psychological, social, and spiritual growth of both men and women in the African American community. According to hooks, “Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are oft en seduced in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination-imperialism, sexism, racism, classism.”3
