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Hood

Object Lessons

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Hood

By: Alison Kinney
Narrated by: Rachel Handshaw
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Bloomsbury presents Hood by Alison Kinney, read by Rachel Handshaw.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

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.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.©2016 Alison Kinney (P)2025 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Aesthetics Anthropology Beauty, Grooming & Style Literary History & Criticism Media Studies Philosophy Social Sciences
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Critic reviews

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.
From executioners in modern-day Florida, to the Ku Klux Klan, to ‘hug a hoodie’ Cameron – this scholarly study explores a complicated cultural history ... [Kinney's] argument about the connection between hoods and power is a strong one ... The book is at its best on the connections between hoods and marginalised communities.
Alison Kinney's Hood is short but ambitious, considering not just the hoodie as a marker of social exclusion both willed and unwilled, the preferred mufti of rappers and death-metallists, but also the wider cultural implications of covering or cowling the head ... This provocative [book] ... raises more questions than it seeks to answer - but that's fitting when the issues it discusses are still so urgent and so open.
In spry and intelligent prose, Alison Kinney tours the many uses of the hood in human culture, exploring seemingly unconnected byways and guiding the reader through some surprising connections. The ubiquitous hood, she shows, is an artifact of human relationships with power, the state, and one another. By the end of my time with Hood, I had laughed out loud, sighed in exasperation, and felt by turns both furious and proud.
Kinney's book Hood, part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, explores how one piece of clothing has the power to threaten, terrify, comfort, as well as cover pizza bloat. A writer whose work has appeared at Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, Lapham's Quarterly, and The New York Times, her first book is about ambiguity of the hood through time, and how 'this ambiguity tends to serve the powerful, at the expense of the powerless, regardless of who's wearing the hoods.'
This slim, energetic book ricochets between medieval executioners, Abu Ghraib, anarchist protestors, the Ku Klux Klan, Trayvon Martin, and the Grim Reaper in search of a Unified Theory of Hoods. Surprisingly, it ends up finding one, and unearths all manner of fascinating hood-related facts along the way.
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