Noliwe Rooks

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Noliwe Rooks
Born1963 (age 59–60)
Occupation(s)Chair of and professor in the Africana Studies department at Brown University
Academic background
Alma mater University of Iowa
Notable worksHair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women

Ladies Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture that Made Them

Contents

White Money/Black Power: African American Studies and the Crises of Race in Higher Education

Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education

Noliwe Rooks (born 1963) is an American academic and author. She is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor and chair of Africana Studies at Brown University and is the founding director of the Segrenomics Lab at Brown. [1] She previously held the W.E.B. Du Bois Professorship of Literature at Cornell University. [2]

Early life and education

Rooks was born in 1963 to Belvie Rooks, a writer from the Fillmore District in San Francisco. [3] Rooks spent her childhood in San Francisco with her mother and in Florida with her father and grandmother. [3] She also traveled with her mother to Africa and the Caribbean. [3]

Rooks earned her B.A. in English from Spelman College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa. [4]

Career

By 1996, Rooks was one of the first Black professors in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. [3] She was the associate director of the African-American program at Princeton University for ten years, [5] [6] and published White Money, Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education while she was there. [7]

Rooks arrived at Cornell University in 2012 as an associate professor of Africana studies. At Cornell, Rooks was the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature and published Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education. [5] [8] In Cutting School, Rooks coined the term "segrenomics" to describe a form of profit derived by businesses that continue to sell what she describes as "separate, segregated, and unequal forms of education" during the modern era of privatization and deregulation of public education. [5] [9] [10]

After the spring 2021 semester at Cornell, she joined the faculty of Brown. [11]

Books

Critical reception

Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women

In a review of Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women for Signs , Paulla A. Ebron of Stanford University writes, "Rooks usefully disrupts a black/white binary in which racism necessarily constructs singular standards of beauty." [12] In a review of Jazz by Toni Morrison, Richard Pearce of Wheaton College writes in Narrative, "In Hair Raising, an exemplary study of African American beauty discourse, Rooks traces and analyzes the major shifts in advertising tactics of the African American beauty industry from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century", before describing some of her analysis in detail over several pages. [13]

Ladies Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture that Made Them

In a review of Ladies Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture that Made Them for African American Review , Cynthia A. Callahan of the Ohio State University at Mansfield writes, "Rooks's study performs an important service by identifying these publications and situating them in the mutually informative contexts of the postbellum Great Migration, the rise of consumer culture, and African American women's attempts to redefine the sexual stereotypes applied to them in the dominant culture." [14] In a review for The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education , Camille A. Clarke writes, "Rooks' research provides a wealth of information about the impact that early black women's magazine writers had in shaping the minds of Negro women around the turn of the century." [15] In a review for American Periodicals, Frances Smith Foster of Emory University writes, "The most useful elements of this book for print culture scholars are that it brings attention to the existence of African American women's magazines, provides brief biographies of the lives and times of some women who edited and wrote for them, and lays a broad foundation of analysis upon which others can and should build. The most exciting thing about this book is that Rooks' persistent sleuthing has discovered extant copies of periodicals long thought forever lost." [16]

White Money/Black Power: African American Studies and the Crises of Race in Higher Education

In an essay review of White Money/Black Power: African American Studies and the Crises of Race in Higher Education for The Journal of African American History , Alan Colón of Dillard University concludes, "The Black Studies movement, and the tradition from which it emanated, requires documentation, analysis, and interpretation that surpasses what is found in White Money/Black Power." [17] In an essay review for The Black Scholar , Perry A. Hall concludes, "There are, as indicated, ideas within her text that could bear fruitful discussion. However, in the form they have been presented - buried and entangled in flaws in logic and structure, and gaps in perspective - they are largely unusable." [18] In The Journal of African American History, James B. Stewart of Pennsylvania State University writes, "Hall took Rooks to task appropriately for ignoring the comprehensive exploration of the origin and evolution of Black/Africana Studies contained in the volume by Dolores Aldridge and Carlene Young, Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies (2000)." [19] Publishers Weekly describes the book as "Perhaps too specialized for general readers, this volume is a must for anyone working in the field." [20]

Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education

In a review of Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education, Kirkus Reviews writes, "Weighing in on the charged topic of public education, Rooks [...] mounts a blistering and persuasive argument against school reforms that she sees as detrimental to disadvantaged students." [21] Publishers Weekly writes that Rooks "introduces the term segrenomics, which she defines as 'the business of profiting from high levels of racial and economic segregation.'" [9] In a review for Education and Urban Society , Lauren Martin, Katie Loomis and Jemimah L. Young write, "Rooks tells the story of racism and segregation in America with a beautiful and heartbreakingly human element that captures the essence of where we stand in education today." [22] Wendy Lecker writes in the Stamford Advocate , "Rooks illustrates how officials and 'reformers' have virtually ignored successful models for education, such as: adequate funding, integration, and community-initiated reforms." [23] In a February 2018 article for The New York Times , Tayari Jones named Cutting School as the last book that had made her furious, writing, "My hair almost caught on fire when I read the chapter about single moms tossed into prison - prison - for trying to enroll their children into schools in better-resourced neighborhoods. [...] This is an important work; hopefully it will make people mad enough to act." [24]

Honors and awards

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References

  1. ↑ "Noliwe Rooks". Brown University. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  2. ↑ "Noliwe Rooks". Cornell University. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Ness, Carol (February 25, 1996). "For these black women, gains outnumber pains". SFGate. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  4. ↑ "We Were Never Meant To Survive, But We Have – Black Women and Political Leadership". blogs.cornell.edu. Retrieved September 7, 2021.
  5. 1 2 3 Strauss, Valerie (January 19, 2018). "How 'segrenomics' underpins the movement to privatize public education". The Washington Post. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  6. ↑ Boynton, Robert S. (April 14, 2002). "BLACK STUDIES TODAY; Out of Africa, and Back". The New York Times. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  7. ↑ Gordon, Ed (January 30, 2006). "'White Money' and Black Studies Departments". NPR. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  8. 1 2 Swift, Jackie. "Investigating the Lived Experience". Cornell Research. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  9. 1 2 "Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education". Publishers Weekly . August 7, 2017. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  10. ↑ Joffe-Walt, Chana (July 30, 2020). "The Reading List Behind 'Nice White Parents'". The New York Times. Retrieved September 6, 2021.
  11. ↑ "52 accomplished scholars join Brown faculty as 2021-22 academic year begins". Brown University. Retrieved September 7, 2021.
  12. ↑ Ebron, Paulla A. (Winter 1999). "Review". Signs. The University of Chicago Press. 24 (2): 545–547. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  13. ↑ Pearce, Richard (October 1998). "Toni Morrison's "Jazz": Negotiations of the African American Beauty Culture". Narrative. 6 (3): 307–324. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  14. ↑ Callahan, Cynthia A. (Spring 2006). "Reviewed Work(s): Ladies' Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture That Made Them by Noliwe M. Rooks". African American Review . The Johns Hopkins University Press. 40 (1): 175–177. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  15. ↑ Clarke, Camille A. (Summer 2005). "Black Women at the Newsstand". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education . The JBHE Foundation, Inc. (48): 128. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  16. ↑ Foster, Frances Smith (2005). "Reviewed Work(s): Ladies' Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the CultureThat Made Them by Noliwe M. Rooks". American Periodicals. 15 (2): 223–224. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  17. ↑ Colón, Alan (Spring 2008). "Reflections on the History of Black Studies: Noliwe M. Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education". The Journal of African American History. 93 (2): 217–279. doi:10.1086/JAAHv93n2p271 . Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  18. ↑ Hall, Perry A. (2006). "History, Memory and Bad Memories: Noliwe M. Rooks' "White Money/Black Power": The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education". The Black Scholar. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 36 (2–3): 55–61. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  19. ↑ Stewart, James A. (Winter 2015). "Black/Africana Studies, Then and Now: Reconstructing A Century of Intellectual Inquiry and Political Engagement, 1915–2015". The Journal of African American History . 100 (1): 87–118. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  20. ↑ "White Money, Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education". Publishers Weekly . December 5, 2005. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  21. ↑ "Cutting School". Kirkus Reviews . June 27, 2017. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  22. ↑ Martin, Lauren; Loomis, Katie; Young, Jemimah L. (June 2020). "Cutting School: The Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education". Education and Urban Society: 1–4. doi:10.1177/0013124519900159 . Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  23. ↑ Lecker, Wendy (January 6, 2018). "Wendy Lecker: The segrenomics of U.S. education". Stamford Advocate. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
  24. ↑ "Tayari Jones: By the Book". The New York Times. February 6, 2018. Retrieved August 24, 2021.
  25. ↑ "2018 Legacy Award Winners Announced". Hurston/Wright Foundation . Retrieved August 29, 2021.
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