“What is the relationship of the epicenter to the hypocenter and did hooks see such a division in her theoretical and political projects? The United States, an imperial project for centuries, through warfare, raids and invasions and carpet bombing, disappeared people on continents and in countries throughout the “Third World.” In previous centuries, the war on one continent led to the enslavement and genocide of Indigenous peoples. [...] In the US, the language of democracy and electoral politics (with the electoral college and Supreme Court as arbiters) shape the epicenter of advocacy and statism. The war zone has been nested in the underground, within the hypocenter. Ground Zero. The epicenter is the surface of politics and everyday struggle within conventional parameters. The hypocenter is ground zero or core of revolutionary struggles. The epicenter is the surface of life and struggle. An earthquake at the core of struggle would register only mildly on the surface of conventional life: the zone in which caretakers pick up groceries and help with homework and medical care. The hypocenter is underground at the center of the core. “Ground Zero.” This is where the police batter and arrest, at times abetted by reactionaries, protesters, and anti-war organizers. The material struggles or wars that unfold not as personal traumas but as foreign policies explode at ground zero. [...] Revolutionary struggle on the level of the hypocenter is a vortex of confronting genocide. Of course, the epicenter and the hypocenter are linked. However, the former seems to be more popularized and more abstract in relation to the evils that bell hooks denounced: imperialism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. The brutal breakage that stalks the organizers and resisters tied to the hypocenter seems rarely deeply discussed in (Black) feminisms. Violence and turmoil and news feeds on wars seep from war zones to the top of news feeds, political debate, and entertainment. The epicenter, the surface of struggle, feels a tremor when the hypocenter explodes. Our advocacy seems better suited to the epicenter than to the carnage of the hypocenter. If we choose to hyper-focus, looking through crevices, we can reveal the extreme carnage inflicted on political rebels, resistors, captives: the killings of environmentalists, the disappearances of children, the attacks of all genders in prison and in ICE detention centers. That is the profile of the hypocenter. As is true for the radical or progressive majority, I have a lot of fear. As I age, I think about decades ago in the South when older Black women sat on the porch in rocking chairs and shared their wisdom (and gossip) about the world. Their candor, sense of propriety and property lines, and abandonment when protecting the vulnerable is as comforting as their home-made quilts. They dedicated themselves to care that was not charity or an open market for those who take but could not contribute or give back. I am not asking “what would bell hooks do?” I just wonder how bell hooks navigated being stuck while trying to reach aspirations which were ethical. Yet, her political acumen from within the epicenter was framed by academia and so limited to progressive liberalism. The hypocenter is the zone of state repression. Yet, hooks and popular forms of feminism seem to have little to say about transformative feminism that engages revolutionary struggle not at the epicenter of petition and liberal society which is a comfort zone but at the hypocenter where the maroon is more vulnerable to becoming a political prisoner. Even when the non-radical actor becomes a politicized prisoner or prisoner of random capture by police forces, hooks, as is the norm, seems to be distanced or alienated from the organizers “on the ground” who collect data and analyses that pierce through deceptive narratives.”
Joy James, Musings on the Epicenter/Hypocenter Analytics & The Feminism of bell hooks (x)
