Lesson 5

1. Eating the Other
bell hooks

2. Today
 To know the key points of bell hook’s
essay ‘Eating the Other’
 To be able to apply bell hook’s theory to a
range of media texts
 To analyse key texts in relation to bell
hook’s theory

4.  bell hooks wrote an essay called ‘Eating the
Other’
 Explores the relationship between race and
media representation
 The commodification of difference
 Exploitation of the ‘other’ by a white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy
 Cultural appropriation
 Orientalism
bell hooks

5. you are constantly told that your
hairstyles are too ethnic or too exotic,
that maybe you should think about
being more approachable. But as
soon a white girl wears the same
style they call it edgy and chic and
they get to change the name and
claim it as their own.

6. ‘Eatingthe
Other’
The over-riding fear is that
cultural, ethnic, and racial
differences will be continually
commodified and offered up as new
dishes to enhance the white palate
– that the Other will be eaten,
consumed, and forgotten.

7. Orientalism
Referring to the representation of
Asian and African cultures in the
media
Link to notion of hegemony
Exaggeration, distortion, imagines
Arab cultures as exotic, uncivilised
and sometimes dangerous

8. orientalism
desire & food
‘anti-blackness’ in binary
opposition to the desire for
whiteness
people of colour as exotic, ‘the
other’.

9. fetishisation of black masculinity
white people dictate the
relationship with ‘the other’
fantasy out of mundane life
black male performativity

10.  minority groups
become alternative
playgrounds for the
dominating race, who
affirm their power
 within commodity
culture, ethnicity
becomes spice,
seasoning that can
liven up the dull dish
that is mainstream
white culture.

11. “trying on for fun”
White elitism protecting
the status quo through
racism towards people of
colour

12. Narratives in the
professional media are
narrow and often racist

13. Whiteness is
the standard
or norm

17.  In ancient religious practices
among so called ‘primitive ‘
people the heart of a person may
be ripped out and eaten so that
one can embody that person’s
spirit of special characteristics.

18. Consumption of
blackness for
pleasure

19. it lets some people get
rewarded for things the
creators never got credit
for

20.  White cultural appropriation of
black culture threatens to
decontextualize and thereby
erase the knowledge of the
specific historical and social
context of black experience from
which cultural productions and
distinct styles emerge.

25.  capitalism encourages white
consumers to feel an imagined
intimacy with racial otherness via
exotic or primitive fantasies
which in fact reinforce the status
quo
 flirting with ‘the other’
 problematic because the people
appropriating the culture do not
receive the same negative labels
or have to face the same negative
stereotypes