10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16459
The essay reconstructs the publishing history of bell hooks in Italy, showing the link between her works and the progress of the country. After a period of silence, in the last few years, her name has returned to the fore. Some topics which, at the end of the Twentieth century, seemed futuristic, for instance that of ‘intersectionality’, had visibly been proposed within Italian society. This different Italy, no longer white or aware of being no longer populated only by productive white males, was finding its own words and its own theoretical benchmarks. bell hooks had finally met her public.
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Essays                                                 USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics. Vol. 6 (2023)
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16459                                                             ISSN 2611-2752




                     The Publishing History of bell hooks in Italy

                                                   Maria Nadotti

                  Submitted: January 16, 2023 – Accepted: February 16, 2023 – Published: March 6, 2023



                                                       Abstract

         The essay reconstructs the publishing history of bell hooks in Italy, showing the link between her
         works and the progress of the country. After a period of silence, in the last few years, her name has
         returned to the fore. Some topics which, at the end of the Twentieth century, seemed futuristic, for
         instance that of ‘intersectionality’, had visibly been proposed within Italian society. This different
         Italy, no longer white or aware of being no longer populated only by productive white males, was
         finding its own words and its own theoretical benchmarks. bell hooks had finally met her public.
         Keywords: bell hooks; publishing history; Italy; public; feminism.




Maria Nadotti: Independent Researcher (Italy)
 maria.nadotti@fastwebnet.it
Journalist, essayist, editorial consultant and translator, she writes about theatre, cinema, art, culture and society.
Among her most recent publications: Sesso & Genere (Mimesis 2022); Scrivere al buio (Tamu, 2020); Prove
d’ascolto (edizioni dell’asino, 2011); Necrologhi. Pamphlet sull’arte di consumare (il Saggiatore, 2015); La speranza,
nel frattempo. Una conversazione tra Arundhati Roy, John Berger e Maria Nadotti (Casagrande, 2010); Riga 32 -
John Berger (Marcos y Marcos, 2012) and, in collaboration with John Berger e Selçuk Demirel, What Time Is It?
(Notting Hill Editions, 2019). Italian curator and translator of Berger’s works, in 2021 she conceived the podcast
“Per John B.” https://www.oktafilm.it/podcast/.



Copyright © 2023 Maria Nadotti                                                                                         1
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
bell hooks in Italy                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




1 A Chronicle
I would like to start this reconstruction with the dates and titles of bell hooks’ texts published in Italy
from 1998 until now. Sometimes the publishing history, and any gaps therein, tell us more about
the reception of an author’s work than any rationale, as they are the link between that work and the
historical progress of the country where they are published, and therefore of the transformation of
the readers they are intended for.
    And, as we will see, what changes is inevitably also the language in which the work is translated. Is
perhaps language not one of the most transparent symptoms of the mood of an era, the attempt of
some ‘minorities’ to shift the needle of the social and political compass not towards greater inclusion
but rather towards the awareness that the majority is by nature variegated, unstable, polymorphic?
The translation work—never finished, never definitive, mercurial like all facts of communication and
interpretation—would damage precisely that living, lively and constantly changing organism that is
the mother and father language, if it insisted on standardizing, normalizing, reducing to the identical,
but also if it wanted to establish new, binding rules.
    To maintain the rhythm, the temperature, the discordant subjectivity of a voice as it is ferried from
one language/culture to another, it is certainly not enough to adopt new rules and new prohibitions.
Encrusted as it is by the class, race, sex, age and vicissitudes of the writer, but also by that which comes
before the word, a past that precedes us, language is tight in any normative cage.
    But here is the list and its timeline. For the sake of completeness and to place the texts within the
framework of their transatlantic voyage, readers will also find the title, publisher and year of the first
US edition of each book.

        bell hooks, Elogio del margine: Razza, sesso e mercato culturale, trans. Maria Nadotti (Milano:
        Feltrinelli, 1998). This anthology of hooksian works was created by me with bell’s approval
        and therefore does not have an American equivalent.

        Maria Nadotti, Scrivere al buio: Maria Nadotti intervista Bell Hooks (Milano: Tartaruga, 1998).

        bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow & Co, 2000); Maria
        Nadotti, ed., Tutto sull’amore: Nuove visioni, trans. Lucia Cornalba (Milano: Feltrinelli,
        2000).

        bell hooks/Maria Nadotti, Elogio del margine/Scrivere al buio, new joint edition (Napoli:
        Tamu Edizioni, 2020).

        bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and Lon-
        don: Routledge, 1994); Insegnare a trasgredire. L’educazione come pratica della libertà, trans.
        Feminoska (Milano: Meltemi Editore, 2020).

        bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (Boston: South End Press, 2000);
        Il femminismo è per tutti. Una politica appassionata, trans. Maria Nadotti (Napoli: Tamu Edi-
        zioni, 2021).

        bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (London and New York: Routledge,
        2003); Insegnare comunità. Una pedagogia della speranza, trans. Feminoska (Milano:
        Meltemi Editore, 2022).

        bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square
        Press, 2004); La volontà di cambiare: Mascolinità e amore, trans. Bruna Tortotella (Milano: il
        Saggiatore, 2022).

        bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow & Co, 2000); Tutto
        sull’amore. Nuove visioni, new edition, trans. Maria Nadotti (Milano: il Saggiatore, 2022).

        bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters, Routledge, London and New York, NY 2000; Da
        che parte stiamo: La classe conta, trans. Marie Moïse (Napoli: Tamu Edizioni, 2022).


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bell hooks in Italy                                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




        bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love (New York: William Morrow, 2002); Co-
        munione: La ricerca femminile dell’amore, trans. Maria Nadotti (Milano: il Saggiatore, 2023).

        bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, (New York: Routledge, 2010); In-
        segnare il pensiero critico, trans. by feminoska (Milano: Meltemi, 2023).

    I also refer to the interview in the television studios of the University of Florence in 1998 for
the series “Archivio della scrittura delle donne in Toscana dal 1861 ad oggi,” curated by Liana Borghi,
Maria Teresa Caciagli Fancelli, Ernestina Pellegrini (Department of Modern Philology). Available in
the original language at https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=B-oNSX94g2k, and soon
to be available with Italian subtitles on the website https://www.oktafilm.it



2 In Translation
Some books are truly like karstic rivers: they disappear below ground and resurface elsewhere, at
a later date, with paths that may seem mysterious and yet always have a specific necessity, indeed
sometimes even an urgency. What prevents us from predicting this is our unwillingness to observe
and pick up the early signs. We could also define it as a voluntary, interested unwillingness to allow
those signs to enter our field of view. That which we do not want to see can only surprise us.
     A while back, a reader asked me which were the greatest difficulties I encountered in translating
bell hooks’ texts, and I answered without thinking: finding an Italian publisher willing to publish her
texts.
     It may seem like a joke, but in fact it really isn’t. To clarify this, we have to work backwards and
reconstruct bell’s publishing history in our country. First of all, it must be said that the book the
Neapolitan publisher Tamu wished to start its publications with in November 2020 is the sum of two
books published in Italy in 1998: Elogio del margine: Razza, sesso e mercato culturale (Feltrinelli) and
Scrivere al buio (La Tartaruga). The first is a collection of ten essays chosen by me and translated from
the then-already significant production of an African American feminist theorist who moved easily
between academic teaching, activism and the critique of high and low culture. The second is an all-
encompassing dialog between her and myself.
     At the time, I had produced a small collection of interviews for the publishing house La Tartaruga:
a woman before another woman, a precise I and an equally precise you inquiring about ourselves in
the world, about work, love, friendship, sexuality, writing, family ties, the practices and utopias that
accompany those who have decided to spend the time of life in an unconfused manner, the possible
alliances, pain, failure, loneliness, hope, the desires and inventions that every one of us is capable of
both individually and when we unite with other women. Four of those precious books were produced:
Cassandra non abita più qui: Maria Nadotti intervista Robin Morgan (1996); Andare ancora al cuore delle ferite:
Renate Siebert intervista Assia Djebar (1997); the aforementioned Scrivere al buio (1998); Come una foglia:
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve intervista Donna Haraway (1999).
     The two books by and with bell caused a discreet political echo among women, and in fact shortly
afterwards bell was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Ferrara; and in 2000, for
Feltrinelli, another of her works was successfully published, Tutto sull’amore: Nuove visioni.
     Then, nothing more. A sinkhole. Silence. Until, in the last six or seven years, her name, or rather
it would be correct to say some crucial points of her thought, returned to the fore, if somewhat quietly.
More and more often, I would meet women (and some men) much younger than myself, who spoke
gratefully to me of those texts that quite clearly had been formative for them. Some topics which, in
Italy in 1998, seemed futuristic, for instance that of ‘intersectionality’—an unfortunately too jargonish
word used to say that racism, sexism and classism cannot be separated and fought separately and in
different times, as they are part of a unique script that consists of a dominant and a dominated, an
above and a below, and which stubbornly reproduces them—had visibly been progressively clarified,
and especially proposed within the fabric of Italian society.
     This different Italy, no longer white or perhaps simply aware of being no longer populated only by
productive, well-off white males and not willing to make the rest invisible—the cancellation of a large



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bell hooks in Italy                                                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




part of the society in which we live is not perhaps the prototype of all the other cancellations?—was
finding its own words and its own theoretical benchmarks, in part due to direct experience and in part
through that subtle work of self-analysis and digging that is the analog method.
     bell hooks, Black American feminist of lowly origins, had finally met her ‘public’1 here too. That
Elogio del margine/Scrivere al buio returned to the bookshops precisely in the same period in which the
publisher Meltemi printed another of her formidable essays, Insegnare a trasgredire: L’educazione come
pratica della libertà, was not a coincidence but a confirmation.
     After the publication of Il femminismo è per tutti (Tamu 2021), a provocative book that was published
in the United States in 2000, the hooks case exploded also in Italy. Today both large and small pub-
lishers vie for her texts. 2022 saw the practically simultaneous publication of Insegnare comunità: Una
pedagogia della speranza, the second volume in the so-called hooksian pedagogic trilogy (Meltemi), La
volontà di cambiare: Mascolinità e amore (il Saggiatore), the new and rethought edition of Tutto sull’amore:
Nuove visioni (il Saggiatore) and Da che parte stiamo: La classe conta (Tamu). While a number of other
titles are being prepared for 2023—from Comunione: La ricerca femminile dell’amore to Teaching Critical
Thinking and Writing Beyond Race—which will finally shed full light on bell hooks’ vast and generous
production.



3 Hypothesis
Why is bell hooks necessary in our country today? I believe that this is what we must ask ourselves,
without making do with the current commercial and critical success of her books. Otherwise, we
cannot explain why, from the first “Italian” titles to today, almost twenty-five years of what we could call
latency have passed. Her books had not disappeared, they were merely out of print, but continued to
circulate covertly, in the form of photocopies, handed from person to person in universities and within
the ranks of the movements. This is what the Neapolitan bookshop Tamu must have intercepted
in 2020, when it chose bell as the first author for its newborn publishing house of the same name.
There was a young public of women and men who had grown up in that wilderness which became
Italian political and intellectual life, certainly in search of thoughts, ideas, words that allowed them
to formulate non-repetitive, resigned and depressing analyses of a present to be fully investigated,
and which, above all, allowed them to adopt non-inertial practices, in step with the complexity of the
historical time we are in.
     Meanwhile, Italian society had become decentered, certainly not due to less local cultural con-
sumptions, travels and studies abroad for the well-off, package holidays beyond the national bound-
aries, but because, as James Baldwin wrote in the 1950s, “This world is white no longer, and it will never
be white again.”2 Here, this reality had taken on the sad, classist face of many migratory waves that
had been pushed back, decimated, forced into clandestinity, exploited or the even more desolating
discrimination extending on to the second and third generations, putting the integration and identity
of the children of migrants and mixed couples at risk. Invisible among the invisible, and yet so lively,
precisely because of their awkward, denied and unvalorized position, the racialized young people of
our country were in any case clearly impacting the discursive and political practices that were taking
hold here too. Feminism plus antiracism plus class struggle, because—as Flavia Dzodan well states,
cited by Sarah Ahmed in her splendid Living a Feminist Life, “Feminism will be intersectional or ‘it will
be bullshit’.”3




1.   The term ‘public’ here is one of those words that can’t be used with a light heart, inflated by its banalization as a synonym
     of a group of persons who consume certain goods or use certain services. While bell hooks’ readers ‘purchase’ her books,
     this cannot be identified merely within a ‘market’ segment or niche, as their reading of them makes them totally political,
     active, seeking to understand in order to change. Some texts cannot simply be read, as they produce a residue of awareness
     and consciousness that cannot be reduced to information or cultural consumption.

2.   James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” Harper’s Magazine, October 1953, 42–48.

3.   Quoted in Sara Ahmed, Vivere una vita femminista, trans. Marta D’Epifanio, Bea Gusmano, Serena Naim, Roberta Granelli
     (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2021), 27



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bell hooks in Italy                                                                     USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




4     Practices
To measure the reliability of the previous theories, I would like to try and explain a very recent ‘setting’
of Tutto sull’amore, bell hooks’ book that, in late October 2022, was published in a new version. Here
are the facts, and a few pictures.
    On 15 January 2022, in the midst of the Covid lockdown, I received this e-mail from Emilia, the co-
founder of ‘Compost’, a group of women and men from Palermo interested in the practices of active
thought. The name of their digital chat is, quite significantly, ‘Assemblea delle lucciole’ (“Assembly of
the Fireflies”).

        Hello everybody,
        I’m writing to invite you to the next ‘compost’ (or seminar, or study group, or however
        you wish to call it)
        FRIDAY 4 FEBRUARY, 3.30 pm
        online (I’ll send you the link a few days beforehand)
        In recent days, not only did I receive the e-mail with the gift of Tutto sull’amore from
        Caterina, but I also discussed some wonderful ideas, firstly in the mountains with Alberto,
        and then with Maria, Gisella and Ilaria at the sea.
        It turns out that there is still a desire for opportunities for reflection and theory.
        It turns out that the circle has widened.
        It turns out that bell hooks is important to us, that we still want to read her and we are so
        lucky that Maria Nadotti, whom I know very well (and who from now on will receive our
        e-mails) is with us.
        For me, right now, in particular, when I feel bonds and ties in my body that end up wrap-
        ping the mind in repetitive, stale, monochrome and monothematic thoughts, the joy of
        learning and discovering that what we can know and explore is inexhaustible, fills me with
        giddy vitality.
        Doing this together is even more joyful.
        I have learnt from the previous composts that a whole book is too much to discuss in
        one meeting, so having leafed through it I propose that we read only a few chapters, in
        addition to the introduction:
        1. Clarity: give love words
        2. Justice: childhood love lessons
        4. Commitment: let love be love in me
        6. Values: living by a love ethic
        I think it is necessary to start from the first two, in order to enter the topic with her, with
        the words she chooses to say it.
        In the second there is childhood, perhaps we ourselves as girls and boys, but also our way
        of being with children, as we see them.
        The third poses unobvious questions about us, about how we feel or how we felt.
        The fourth broaches the issue of power and domination of the other.
        Other chapters intrigue me greatly, but they seem very dense, it’s better to read less, in
        order to investigate more.
        (Obviously everyone is free to read whatever more they want, of this book and others, and
        to introduce into the conversation anything they feel can be part of our discourse).
        Moreover, as in compost there was already a desire for discussion starting from texts in
        different languages, we suggest you watch, or watch again, ROMA by Alfonso Cuaron,
        you’ll find it on Netflix.


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bell hooks in Italy                                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




        Finally, tomorrow or in the next few days we will propose another reading in addition to
        the chapters of Tutto sull’amore by bell hooks.
        Hugs, Emilia

     There will be online meetings and more and more people will join. The digital ‘compost’ in
Palermo will open up and welcome women and men from other parts of the world, launching a far-
reaching collective discussion on love, its promises and its doubts in a time dominated by fear, social
distancing, solitude, diffidence, and above all a bizarre removal of bodies and the cancellation of the
emotions that accompany the senses. In hindsight, it is clear that those virtual and yet very loving
meetings were a lifeline in all the frost that covered our lives in those months.
     Meanwhile, I’m devoting my time to the practically complete reworking of the original translation
of Tutto sull’amore. The new publisher asked me to review it, and rather distractedly I agreed, thinking
it would just be a matter of moving a few commas and changing a few words. But I find myself facing
an interpretative challenge: in the old translation, bell hooks is perfectly present in terms of contents,
but was made invisible in syntactic and lexical terms. She was betrayed in what is most apparently
dear to her: the linguistic closeness to the rhythm of speech and the experience of life, the unwilling-
ness to accept the doubtful theoretical ‘fluidity’ of high/academic jargon. As she herself states several
times, the language in which she writes is, OK, American-English, in other words “the language of
the oppressor,” but it is also a potential “place of resistance.” This is why, in the translation too, the
structure she chose must be defended. Her simple, yet never simplifying, parataxis cannot be turned
into hypotaxis.
     As the author chooses an ‘oral’, measured, repetitive, enunciative, never explanatory rhythm, that
rhythm must be maintained at all costs. Not doing so would be like rewriting John Coltrane in the
language of Claudio Baglioni. And that is what I attempt to do. Little by little, before my eyes, Tutto
sull’amore regains its disarming clarity, its political urgency, its ability to stand out from the sentimental
treacle of the New Age texts that bell is so out of tune with.
     And here, to offer greater clarity, I would like to offer the words of the author, in her precious
interview in the summer of 1994 with Lawrence Chua:4

        LC I was curious how your own critical language is developing, with which strategy in
        mind.
        bh I’ve been trying to use different languages for different settings, and it’s hard. One of
        the things I’m trying to do is break with the traditional essay format, which has been an
        exhilarating and exciting format for me. But it also takes time. I’d like to do work that is
        more mixed media and pastiche. But when you want to make a shift, then you come up
        against an industry that doesn’t want you to because they’ve already got a proven prod-
        uct. This has been very harmful to African American writers in general. I am constantly
        working to shift my voice and to try to use it differently.

        LC Have editors become more receptive to that linguistic transgression?
        bh I went through this period where I would try to use more street language and it would
        all come back to me, completely edited back to standard English. These few months that
        I’ve been living in New York, I’ve really been overwhelmed by the degree to which there
        is no racial integration in publishing in our society. I’m awed by the lack, not just of
        the concrete visible presence of people of color, but also the failure to have progressive
        white people. We should be able to have spaces in this society where people of color
        are not present, but where antiracist perspectives will inform how things are organized
        and what takes place. No wonder the wheel has to be invented again, and again, and
        again. We’re being told by the publishing world that our major buying audience is a white
        audience. The presumption is of an unenlightened white audience, and when everything
        you write should be pitched to that audience, it becomes a really troubling question of

4.   “bell hooks by Lawrence Chua,” interview by Lawrence Chua, BOMB 48, July 1, 1994, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/
     bell-hooks/



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bell hooks in Italy                                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




        what voice you use, and what space you can occupy. We’re not just talking about the
        straight publishing world, we’re talking about those vehicles in our culture that claim to
        represent some kind of alternative. That says that we have a lot of work to do to truly create
        a culture of resistance, that’s not just occupied by people of color individually knocking
        on the door for change, but that’s really occupied by lots of people who see the necessity
        for having a more complex intellectual artistic life in this culture.

        LC Debates around representation have focused almost exclusively on who is in the frame,
        as if it were separate from how the narrative unfolds. That’s made it difficult for Black
        writers whose work refuses that separation between truth and beauty to publish.
        bh If your perspective isn’t “I’m negating Blackness, in the interest of writing more exper-
        imentally,” but, “I’m affirming Blackness and I still want to write experimentally,” that’s
        when you have trouble selling your product. The question I’m asked most often about
        my writing is: Who is the perceived audience? There’s this sense that if you really want to
        have that crossover audience, you’ve got to simplify, you’ve got to translate, you’ve got to
        make everything clear. But we know that there are a lot of interesting books by white writ-
        ers that don’t simplify, that don’t make everything clear, and people presume that they
        will have an audience. There’s a myth about artistic freedom, that it resides with the indi-
        vidual writer, and not that artistic freedom has to be mirrored in the publishing practices
        of a culture, or when you’re talking about art, the practices of galleries and museums.

    But let’s go back to Palermo and take a leap forward. In June 2022, sitting around a table in Piazza
Marina with the now self-defined “friends in a circle”—Emilia, Ilaria, Gisella, Alli, Cristina, Fernanda—
we discuss what to do. When I announce that at the end of October the new and re-worked edition
of Tutto sull’amore will be published, Ilaria makes a proposition: “Let’s take bell’s words of love to the
squares of Palermo, let’s fill the city with thoughts of love.” And that’s it. In mid-September, while
the book is being printed, we start to meet up on Zoom every other Monday evening and … we plot.
Other voices and other hands begin to join us: Guido, Letizia, Carolina from Milan and Bologna,
Stefania, Silvia, Andrea, Caterina, Vivian, Lara, Claudia, Anna, Chicca, Costanza, the friends from
booq in Palermo.
    We end up with a packed, far-reaching program: “l’inondazione d’amore” (“the inundation of love”)—
the name suggested by Cristina, who manages the city’s ‘Mare Memoria Viva Urban Ecomuseum’—
took shape and Vivian drew a map and inventoried the many locations:
    The horizontal way in which we worked, with mutual generosity and passion, with no hierarchies,
vested interests or conflicts, are the sign that the loving discourse proposed by bell, so un-private, so
radically political and communal, is joyfully infectious. And we realized that not only we can, but
we must rebel against that passivity and fragmentation that everything seems to lead to. Ours is real
weaving, indeed it’s a quilt. And what is most thrilling is that today, now that it is over, it still continues,
branches out and we have no idea where it will lead in future.
    At ZEN 25 having read and discussed the pages of her book in their group, the women of Handala6
made a bell hooks doll, they printed out and affixed to the walls in the neighborhood a poster with


5.   Still today, ZEN2 is an area that represents an unsolved issue in the field of urban regeneration of the Italian suburbs.
     A district with a strong physical and social identity lying in the northern part of Piana dei Colli in Palermo, the result
     of the city’s northwards expansion, which has profoundly transformed the landscape. It was developed following the
     competition launched by the Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari (IACP) in 1969 to extend the Zona Espansione Nord, won
     by the design of Franco Amoroso, Salvatore Bisogni, Vittorio Gregotti, Franco Purini and Hiromichi Matsui. Although
     arousing considerable interest in the national and international architectural debate, the project was subject to several
     variants that betrayed the designers’ intentions, and was never completely developed. (Andrea Sciascia, Tra le modernità
     dell’architettura. La questione del quartiere Zen 2 di Palermo (Palermo: L’Epos, 2003).

6.   The Handala voluntary association was set up in Palermo in 2008 by a group of social workers who had been working for
     years in the degraded neighborhoods of the city of Palermo, particularly ZEN, Kalsa and Albergheria. The main purposes
     of the association are: promoting the respect and full exercise of human, political and social rights of unemployed and/or
     marginalized persons using methods that foster active participation and citizenship; fighting educational poverty by cre-
     ating cultural and educational opportunities for children, young people and families; fighting gender violence through
     female empowerment and emancipation. Their website is https://associazionehandala.org/.



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bell hooks in Italy                                                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




                                              Fig. 1: Inondazione d’amore a Palermo



the phrase that most struck them: “Love is as love does,” and the same words were embroidered on a
large banner that, on 25 November, they took to the streets of Palermo in the protest march against
violence against women.
    Another group of women, working in the Sant’Agnese parish of Danisinni, a city district consid-
ered off-limits, chose another material and another dynamic for making the words of love in bell’s
book—read thoroughly and carefully during a series of afternoon meetings—their own. They extrap-
olated the phrases that spoke most to the participants, each one re-writing them in their own way,
with more intimate and pertinent words, painting them on small ceramic tiles to be laid in the local
nursery, closed in 2007 and planned to be reopened in late 2023. A priority for the population of a
neighborhood counting over six thousand inhabitants, with many children, the love tiles of hooks—
who hated the cold-footed theory of those who make do with words—will cover the façade.
    And here, to end this brief insight into an extraordinary adventure that we hope to be able to tell
in more detail in a podcast mixing bell’s words with those of the many people who have been at her
side in Palermo a year after her death, is the work that a group of students from the city’s Fine Arts
Academy decided to create together with one of their professors, the artist Stefania Galegati. In this
case the words are not bell’s, but they relate to her in the passion and conscience of what we have
in common and that makes us human. They were written by John Berger, an author who was dear
to hooks, at the end of his And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos.7 The chosen location is the peak
of Mount Pellegrino, looking over the sea and the Santa Maria dei Rotoli cemetery,8 where for some
time now there has been no room even for those who die.




7.   John Berger, E i nostri volti, amore mio, leggeri come foto, trans. Maria Nadotti (Milano: il Saggiatore, 2020).

8.   Santa Maria dei Rotoli cemetery lies in the Vergine Maria district of Palermo, and is the city’s largest cemetery. It was built
     on the slopes of Mount Pellegrino in 1837 when, following a cholera epidemic, the Sant’Orsola cemetery could no longer
     cope with all the corpses. Since 2019, the situation in this large cemetery looking over the sea has reached emergency
     levels: due to a lack of space, today there are one thousand and ten corpses waiting to be buried.



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16459                                                                                      8
bell hooks in Italy                                                                   USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




     Fig. 2: The bell hooks doll with Concetta and Mariella, two of the women who designed and made her




                                 Figg. 3, 4: Palermo, ZEN 2, 25 November 2022



https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16459                                                               9
bell hooks in Italy                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




                              Fig. 5: 25 November 2022, at the protest in Palermo




                                       Fig. 6: 6 December 2022, Danisinni




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16459                                                            10
bell hooks in Italy                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




                                      Figg. 7, 8: Milan, 20 December 2022




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16459                                                     11
bell hooks in Italy                                                         USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




                                     Figg. 9, 10: Milan, 20 December 2022




https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16459                                                    12
