ABSTRACT
CW Begin by telling me what your motivation has been for becoming an intellectual. Talk about your work, and the politics of both your personal relationships and your politics of resistance.
bh A passion for ideas, for thinking critically, lay the groundwork for my commitment to intellectual life. That passion began in childhood. When I was young I had, and continue to have, an insatiable longing to read everything-know everything. To this day I remain the kind of reader for whom nothing is off limits, from children's books, Harlequin romances, car and fashion magazines, self-help books, all kinds of pulp, to ·economic, sociological, psychological, literary, and feminist theory. I love to read across disciplines. I am always astonished by academics who show no interest in work outside their discipline. For me, reading broadly has been absolutely essential to the kind of speculative critical thinking that informs my work. I have said in other writing that the difficulty many academics have when called to speak and write from an inclusive standpoint-one where ideas are looked at from a multidimensional perspective that begins with an analysis rooted in an understanding of race, gender, and class is due to the gap created by a lack of information. Since so many scholars and academics have been trained to think and study along narrow disciplinary lines, the knowledge they produce rarely addresses the complexity of our experience or our capacity to know. A pure passion to know was the yearning that seduced me into intellectual life. And that
yearning has really been the impetus motivating me to synthesize and juxtapose in a complex way ideas, experiences that on the surface might not appear to have a point of convergence.
