Hortense Spillers

Hortense Spillers (born 1942) is an American literary critic, Black Feminist scholar and the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at Vanderbilt University. A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003 and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, published by Routledge in 1991.

Life

Spillers received her B.A from University of Memphis in 1964, M.A. in 1966, and her Ph.D in English at Brandeis University in 1974. While at the University of Memphis, she was a disc jockey for the all-black radio station WDIA.^[1] She has held positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University.^[2] Her work has been recognized with awards from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.^[3]

Critical work

Spillers is best known for her 1987 scholarly article "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book", one of the most cited essays in African-American literary studies.^[4] The essay brings together Spillers' investments in African-American studies, feminist theory, semiotics, and cultural studies to articulate a theory of African-American female gender construction.^[5] In the essay, Spillers defines the "symbolic integrity" of "male" and "female," as two subject positions that lose validity and differentiation within captivity (i.e. through dispossession). According to Spillers, ethnicity "de-genders" people by trapping them within a timeless mode of thought, characterizing them always in terms of their ethnic background irrespective of personal identity types of gender, since the "female" within an ethnicity isn’t the same as the "feminine sphere," instead, the female body has been deprived of the feminine.^{[6][7][7][6][8]}

Works

• Spillers, Hortense J. Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• "All the Things You Could Be by Now if Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race." Critical Inquiry. Summer 1996 22. 4
• ---. "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words." Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 152–175. Print. (First published in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Carol Vance, Ed. New York: Pandora/HarperCollins. 1984)
• ---. "‘Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe’: An American Grammar Book." Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 203–229. (First published in Diacritics, Summer 1987
• ---. "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date. 1994." Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 428–470. Print. (First published in Boundary 2 v. 21, Fall 1994)
• --- "Day In the Life of Civil Rights". The Black Scholar. Oakland, CA: May-June 1978. Print.
• Spillers, Hortense J. et al. "‘ Whatcha Gonna Do?’: Revisiting‘ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’: A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, & Jennifer L. Morgan." Women’s Studies Quarterly 35.1/2 (2007): 299–309. Print.
• Hortense J. Spillers, ed. Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Pryse, Marjorie, and Hortense J. Spillers, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

References

External links

• Haslett, Tim. Hortense Spillers Interviewed by Tim Haslett for the Black Cultural Studies web site collective. Ithaca, New York. February 4, 1998.
• Black Cultural Studies-Hortense J. Spillers