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BELONGING: A CULTURE OF PLACE by bell hooks New York: Routledge, 2009. 230 pp. $19.95.
The mainstream media has stumbled upon rural America. Sometime over the past couple of years, during the many months of presidential campaigning and all the small town stops, through the health care politicking and the birth of the Tea Party, pundits seem to have discovered the vast expanse of land connecting the two coasts, the long corridors of space linking their cities. This rural America has begun to capture the public imagination. It is a rural America, we are told, that is broken by a drug epidemic, populated by "a cast of hollow-cheeked white people smoking meth behind the corn silo" (Egan, 2009). It is a rural America, others explain, notable for its voting patterns, filled with a few Democrats - a "special set of Democrats, white, low income and undereducated" (Davis, 2008) - but mostly conservatives, "white, smalltown, uneducated" Tea Partiers unhappy with the leadership of President Obama and uncomfortable with the fact that America "is becoming more urban, less white, and more educated" (Kling, 2009). One constant across this rural America, as portrayed in these media accounts, is its color. It is lily white, an association so common that "rural" seems to have become synonymous with "white." But as columnists heatedly disparage assertions that this white, rural America defines real America (Rich, 2009), they overlook their own faulty assumptions that this whiteness defines rural America.
There is another rural America, one that exists beyond stereotypes and caricatures, one more diverse and more complex. It is a place that thousands of African Americans, Latinas/os, Asians, and Native Americans call home, a place growing ever more racially and ethnically diverse. It is a place with rich histories and unfolding narratives, a place with dense politics of belonging and community. It is an altogether more complicated rural America than recent headlines suggest.
It is a part of this more complicated, more diverse rural America that is portrayed in bell hooks's Belonging: A Culture of Place. In this book, as she explores questions of place and belonging, she gives voice to a narrative that adds complexity and authenticity to current understandings of rural America. hooks's rural America - the Kentucky mountains of...