Those familiar with hooks’ work often read it as an intersectional study of race, class and gender. My reading of hooks was a deliberate expedition to locate the margins where this intersection takes place and to understand them as places of care and uncare. hooks urges those of us who want to produce counter-hegemonic narratives to identify spaces where we can begin a ‘revision’. This suggestion is not very different to what architects set out to do with every project or design. The only difference is the way we understand the need for such a revision. From a social perspective, the place that requires revision is obviously the margin. However, the sparse theoretical knowledge on architecture seldom features a study, design and representation of the margin. Interestingly, the margin itself becomes a place for evolution of space and resistant technology. A confrontation happens and then, we encounter, according to bell hooks, a dichotomy, choosing between the system and the place of political resistance within the system. In the process of producing our architecture we also manufacture culture. The question is wherefrom: what is our position within this gulf; This position defines our subject, the object we produce, the knowledge we generate and our ‘capacity to envision oppositional aesthetic acts.’

Infrastructure, like the railroad in hooks’ essay, ‘Choosing the margin’, physically relegates some to the edge of things. The practice of architecture holds a similar power, one that can dictate who to separate and other and who to protect and preserve. But is it possible to create within this separation, for the othered? Is it possible to build radically within this place of radical openness? And more importantly, can the authors of this resistance claim to have a justified positionality without having acquired one by forcing themselves into the charitable business of creating spaces for the marginalized?

A reading of hooks as an architect is an introspection of something both familiar and alien at the same time. Space is a core object of her work and thus offers architects an acquainted sense of belonging within her work. However, one is immediately then, confronted with the obvious distance between the most important of spaces, the margin and architecture that is far removed from its exploration. In my work as a researcher in India, I tried to understand the entangled margins within a construction site, a unit of architectural production. The site of production is also a homeplace here, the homeplace having further assumed a network of identities each with its own complications. However, from within this homeplace, or perhaps because of its very existence comes the resistance. The social reproduction that is conducted in such homeplaces, the homes of black women in hooks’ essay, ‘Homeplace’, Huda Tayob’s South African markets or the sites in India, is the domestic foundational unit of capitalistic production. And yet, within this relationship, there exists a counter-hegemonic existence that is read as resistance in hooks.

The domestic here, becomes the most exuberant of spaces, active with the energy that sustains the world and the defiance that sustains revolutions. And since architectural theory poses a scarcity of discourse upon the spatial politics of the fringe, we are compelled to look to other sources, in order to create this knowledge. hooks, with her deliberate layering on motifs like the home, work, resistance, margin, memory and belonging nudges readers, especially architect-readers like me to rethink our own solidifying definitions of architecture. She, without having mentioned architecture at all, by simply recording anecdotes and writing politically, creates an account of how deeply divisive spaces can become. This evocative writing is simply reason enough to include hooks in an architect’s reading list. It is also a glimpse into the necessity to understand architecture through various other languages that float around us and look at the margins for discourse that has still not been written.