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The Flesh of the Matter
A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers
Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton
Afterword by Hortense Spillers
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.
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.
Introduction: On Gathering
Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton
[Archival Fragment 1: Calendar entry of The Scholar and the Feminist Conference]
On Thon, or, Thinking Gender in the Interstice
C. Riley Snorton
Oracular Fever Medicine: A Time Travel Oracle for Hortense Spillers
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Fineness of a Sentence, or, Hortense Spillers’s Theoretical Acuity
Kevin Quashie
[Archival Fragment 2: A letter from Toni Morrison to Hortense Spillers, 1984]
When Hortense Spillers and Toni Morrison Meet in the Clearing: The Hieroglyphics of Marking and Unmarking
Margo Natalie Crawford
Performance and Preformance
Fred Moten
[Archival Fragment 3: Journal entry on Gwendolyn Brooks]
Black Reconstruction, or, Names for Love: Hortense Spillers as Reader
Anthony Reed
The Critic Draws: Between a Body and a Building
Amaris Brown
“whatever marvels of my own inventiveness”: Black Feminist Archival Tradition in the Notebooks of Hortense Spillers
Kiana T. Murphy
All the Things You Could Be by Now if Hortense Spillers Was Your Mentor
Nicole Adeyinka Spigner
[Archival Fragment 4: Images of Hortense Spillers in her living room]
The Black Living Room
Shoniqua Roach
[Archival Fragment 5: Journal entry, 1970]
Mama’s Marvelous Tar Baby: Black Feminist Experiments in Spillersian Ecdysis
Ra Malika Imhotep
[Archival Fragment 6: Sparebone program]
[Archival Fragment 7: Letter to Hortense Spillers that names Deborah McDowell and Cheryl Wall]
Grammars and Impression Points: Appreciating Hortense Spillers
Deborah McDowell
Bridging Figurations: Hortense J. Spillers, Essayist
Thadious M. Davis
[Archival Fragment 8: In the Flesh, handwritten talk]
All the Things You Could Be and All the Things You Are
Sharon P. Holland
[Archival Fragment 9: Handwritten album list in Spillers’s journal]
Notes
Contributor Biographies
Index
Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton
[Archival Fragment 1: Calendar entry of The Scholar and the Feminist Conference]
On Thon, or, Thinking Gender in the Interstice
C. Riley Snorton
Oracular Fever Medicine: A Time Travel Oracle for Hortense Spillers
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
The Fineness of a Sentence, or, Hortense Spillers’s Theoretical Acuity
Kevin Quashie
[Archival Fragment 2: A letter from Toni Morrison to Hortense Spillers, 1984]
When Hortense Spillers and Toni Morrison Meet in the Clearing: The Hieroglyphics of Marking and Unmarking
Margo Natalie Crawford
Performance and Preformance
Fred Moten
[Archival Fragment 3: Journal entry on Gwendolyn Brooks]
Black Reconstruction, or, Names for Love: Hortense Spillers as Reader
Anthony Reed
The Critic Draws: Between a Body and a Building
Amaris Brown
“whatever marvels of my own inventiveness”: Black Feminist Archival Tradition in the Notebooks of Hortense Spillers
Kiana T. Murphy
All the Things You Could Be by Now if Hortense Spillers Was Your Mentor
Nicole Adeyinka Spigner
[Archival Fragment 4: Images of Hortense Spillers in her living room]
The Black Living Room
Shoniqua Roach
[Archival Fragment 5: Journal entry, 1970]
Mama’s Marvelous Tar Baby: Black Feminist Experiments in Spillersian Ecdysis
Ra Malika Imhotep
[Archival Fragment 6: Sparebone program]
[Archival Fragment 7: Letter to Hortense Spillers that names Deborah McDowell and Cheryl Wall]
Grammars and Impression Points: Appreciating Hortense Spillers
Deborah McDowell
Bridging Figurations: Hortense J. Spillers, Essayist
Thadious M. Davis
[Archival Fragment 8: In the Flesh, handwritten talk]
All the Things You Could Be and All the Things You Are
Sharon P. Holland
[Archival Fragment 9: Handwritten album list in Spillers’s journal]
Notes
Contributor Biographies
Index
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.
“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
