HOOD

From Bloomsbury Publishing
“Object Lessons” series

“Provocative and highly informative, Alison Kinney’s HOOD considers this seemingly neutral garment accessory and reveals it to be vexed by a long history of violence, from the Grim Reaper to the KKK and beyond–a history we would do well to address, and redress. Readers will never see hoods the same way again.”  SISTER HELEN PREJEAN, author of DEAD MAN WALKING

We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who’s ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney’s HOOD explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless—with deadly results. Kinney considers medieval clerics and the Klan, anti-hoodie campaigns and the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib, the Inquisition and the murder of Trayvon Martin, uncovering both the hooded perpetrators of violence and the hooded victims in their sights.

cover design: Alice Marwick

Thanks to everybody who’s read and written about HOOD: