Overview

Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies. Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton, The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers is the first collection to take up directly how Spillers’s writing on literature, culture, and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought, as well as countless other areas of the academy. Interspersed with archival fragments from Spillers’s papers kept at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Thought at Brown University, the fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us, the nomenclature of enslavement keyed into the American lexicon, and the ways that history permeates our cultural boundaries today.

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9780826507495

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Reviews

""Professor Spillers transformed 'intramural black life' through modeling scrupulous engagement with theory, and she transformed theory by modeling serious engagement with the idea of Black culture."" --Donald E. Pease, coeditor of Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies ""While reading this collection's essays, it is impossible not to gain new knowledge, a deeper sense of how to live, read, move. The Flesh of the Matter is at once homage and galvanization, itself a model for insurgent ground in the present."" --Marquis Bey, author of Black Trans Feminism

""As an inspired collection of essays illuminating nearly fifty years of the field-defining ""word work"" (à la Kevin Quashie) of Hortense Spillers, The Flesh of the Matter is a tour-de-force twice over, from its choice of the eminent, much-read, most-cited Black feminist theorist as its subject par excellence, to its innovative methodology--a kind of archival archeology featuring a generative interplay between Spillers's published scholarship and the gems of genius to be plumbed from within her collected, catalogued, and digitized papers. Drawing from early drafts of Spillers's monumental essays, from notebook, diary and date-book entries, lecture notes, poetry and philosophical musings, marginalia and letters from the likes of Judith Butler and Toni Morrison, this first-of-its kind anthology explores the interstices of Spillers's oeuvre, demonstrating for readers and researchers the importance of archives like the Pembroke Center's Black Feminist Theory Collections in preserving for future generations the foundational labors that helped think and write fields into being, while also enabling the production of new knowledges, creations, and collaborations."" --Ann duCille, author of Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV and Mary Murphy, Nancy L. Buc '65 Pembroke Center Archivist at Brown University ""Intellectually fierce, a master wordsmith, and one of the most gifted cultural theorists of our time, Hortense Spillers merits legions of devotees. The Flesh of the Matter brings together a gifted cadre of critics who serve as our guides through and conversation partners for Spillers's most consequential writings."" --Harvey Young, author of Embodying Black Experience ""While reading this collection's essays, it is impossible not to gain new knowledge, a deeper sense of how to live, read, move. The Flesh of the Matter is at once homage and galvanization, itself a model for insurgent ground in the present."" --Marquis Bey, author of Black Trans Feminism ""Professor Spillers transformed 'intramural black life' through modeling scrupulous engagement with theory, and she transformed theory by modeling serious engagement with the idea of Black culture."" --Donald E. Pease, coeditor of Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies

Author Information

Margo Natalie Crawford is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. C. Riley Snorton is the Mary R. Morton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

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