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.
Introduction: On Gathering
Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton
Archival Fragment 1: Calendar entry for The Scholar and the Feminist Conference
1. On Thon, or, Thinking Gender in the Interstice
C. Riley Snorton
2. Oracular Fever Medicine: A Time Travel Oracle for Hortense Spillers
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
3. 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
4. When Hortense Spillers and Toni Morrison Meet in the Clearing: The Hieroglyphics of Marking and Unmarking
Margo Natalie Crawford
5. Performance and Preformance
Fred Moten
Archival Fragment 3: Journal entry on Gwendolyn Brooks
6. Black Reconstruction, or, Names for Love: Hortense Spillers as Reader
Anthony Reed
7. The Errant Protester: Tracing Black E/motion in the Visual Work of Hortense Spillers
Amaris Brown
8. “whatever marvels of my own inventiveness”: Black Feminist Archival Tradition in the Notebooks of Hortense Spillers
Kiana T. Murphy
9. All the Things You Could Be by Now If Hortense Spillers Was Your Mentor
Nicole A. Spigner
Archival Fragment 4: Images of Hortense Spillers in her living room
10. The Black Living Room
Shoniqua Roach
Archival Fragment 5: Journal entry, 1970
11. Mama’s Marvelous Tar Baby: Black Feminist Experiments in Spillersian Ecdysis
Ra Malika Imhotep
Archival Fragment 6: Sparebone program, 1970
Archival Fragment 7: Letter from Judith Butler to Hortense Spillers, 1992
12. Grammars and Impression Points: Appreciating Hortense Spillers
Deborah E. McDowell
13. Bridging Figurations: Hortense J. Spillers, Essayist
Thadious M. Davis
Archival Fragment 8: “In the Flesh,” handwritten talk
14. “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
Afterword
Hortense J. Spillers
Appendix: Transcriptions of Archival Documents
Contributors
