Belonging: A Culture of Place (hooks, 2009)

This reflection on belonging is situated in hooks’ complex positionalities as a cultural critic and a racialized woman from Kentucky and, more broadly, Appalachia. It explores her own personal journeys from country to city to elsewhere, and her circling back to where she’d begun, in her childhood home place. The book explores the politics of race and class as they relate to land and belonging in rural areas of America, especially after the Great Migration of the 20^th century. It extends ideas of belonging beyond physical presence to the emotional connections felt even in absence or exile, wherein identification with place and people create attachments, and offers consideration of how belonging functions at the intersection of race, gender, and class.

hooks, b. (2009). Belonging: A culture of place. Routledge.