Hortense J Spillers
Biographic Data
| ID | 374840 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hortense J Spillers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hortense J |
| FAMILY NAME | Spillers |
| SIGNATURE | SPILLERS H J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1168 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Touch and Voice inAbsalom, Absalom
William Faulkner constructed Absalom, Absalom! with techniques that allowed him to reach beyond his time and place to a historical grasp of problems that arise from a long past and that continue to shape our world nearly a century after the novel's publication. This essay explores that achievement through a double focus: touch and the intricate phenomenology of human sensory experience, combined with voice and the interplay of writing, speaking, …
Critical Theory in Times of Crisis
This essay looks at the relationship between political movements in the streets and critical theory in the academy. It asks whether today the lack of innovation in critical theory we see in some disciplines occasions, if not reflects, the muting of political dissent outside of the university. Contemporary critical theory now seems split into two separate fields, "criticism" and "theory," revealing a configuration quite unlike what we saw in the e…
A Moment of Protest Becomes a Curricular Object
A speech delivered as the keynote address at Brandeis University's AAAS 50th Anniversary, where Hortense Spillers received Brandeis University's Alumni Achievement Award on February 11, 2019.1
Time and Crisis: Questions for Psychoanalysis and Race
In the triumvirate of personalities and motives—from Wright and Baldwin to Coates—we encounter the essential elements of the “crisis” that configures black passage in the New World. These lines of kinship, both consanguineous and ineffable, travelling from father to son, from uncle to nephew, from one generation to the next, lend us a figurative rhythm that grasps the notion of the processional—the traversal of time and space that remains fundame…
Expostulations and Replies
In this lively intellectual exchange—occasioned in part by the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Hortense Spillers’s revolutionary essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”—the renowned black feminist theorist responds to eleven questions posed by Ann duCille, guest editor of a special issue of differences on “black marriage.” Their exchange ranges from the meaning of marriage in the throes and wake of slavery to Spill…
Stuart Hall in This Moment
Stuart Hall in This Moment Hortense Spillers (bio) At the panel discussion “The Black Intellectual in the African Diaspora: The Example of Stuart Hall,” Hortense Spillers presented these remarks. I want to start by congratulating Charles Rowell for forty years of commitment to an idea and for providing us with numerous occasions that make Callaloo a celebration, that make it a living project rather than a museum of affects. It is a project that s…
The Future of Callaloo: A Round Table
The Future of CallalooA Round Table* Dagmawi Woubshet (bio), Robert Reid-Pharr (bio), LeRonn P. Brooks (bio), Hermine Pinson (bio), Jean-Paul Rocchi (bio), Hortense Spillers (bio), Vievee Francis (bio), Ebony Bailey (bio), and Sonya Posmentier (bio) WOUBSHET: Welcome to the last session of this conference and celebration of Callaloo’s 40th anniversary. The panel is called “The Future of Callaloo: A Round Table.” If you are looking at the program,…
Art Talk and the Uses of History
In a reading of Huey Copeland's Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, Spillers examines the stakes and implications of the work against the broader perspective of black artistic practices in the sociopolitical context of the United States. Looking in detail at aspects of Copeland's quartet of painters, she brings questions of aesthetics alongside present-day political concerns
Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08
Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08” interrogates the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States as a historically ordained event. This essay not only addresses the question of whether we might plausibly read it as the fulfillment of telos but also examines the implications of our having already done so
A Transatlantic Circuit: Baldwin at Mid-Century Opening Keynote Address
A Transatlantic Circuit: Baldwin at Mid-Century Opening Keynote Address Hortense Spillers (bio) On Wednesday, September 19, 1956, the first World Congress of Black Writers and Artists opened at the Sorbonne and convened in the University’s Amphitheatre Descartes until the following Saturday. Among the confreres were James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and though African American, they could justifiably be identified as twixt and between and not rea…
Boundary 2: The Sixties and the World Event
Views of the East Wing: On Michelle Obama
The institution of First Lady is ripe for an overhaul, and Michelle Obama is just the woman to deliver. Already a sensation of the fashion world and of the beautifully sculpted arms, the tall, stri
Long Time”: Last Daughters and the New “New South”
This essay looks at aspects of new southern culture against the backdrop of the 2007 Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation and its impact on our understanding of the sixties. Incorporating two book reviews, the essay argues that the “long” perspective on the period of radical change would suggest that the sixties were not only not a “failure” but in certain respects loom ahead of us
Introduction: The Still Vacillating Equilibrium of the World
We would like to thank Paul Bové and the editors of boundary 2 for their encouragement and support. Special thanks go to John Beverley, sixties man, not only for his work as author, editor, translator, and facilitator for this issue, but for an exemplary and inspiring career of committed, critical, and self-critical scholarship
Democracy in America: Notes of a Native Daughter Two Centuries on
Research Article| August 01 2006 “Democracy in America”: Notes of a Native Daughter Two Centuries on Hortense J. Spillers Hortense J. Spillers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2006) 33 (3): 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-2006-012 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Hortense J. Spillers; “Democracy in America”: Notes of a Native Daughter Two…
The Idea of Black Culture
The Idea of Black Culture Hortense J. Spillers (bio) A return to the idea of black culture must be considered today in a critical climate that is not hospitable to the topic, even though hospitality and accommodation have never been attributes of the context in which the idea was either engendered or understood. An aspect of the problematic for the investigator, then, is to get in sight a horizon of inquiry that will enable, if not necessarily vo…
Travelling with Faulkner
The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Today
Research Article| May 01 2003 “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Today Hortense J. Spillers Hortense J. Spillers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2003) 30 (2): 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-2-5 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Hortense J. Spillers; “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Today. boundary 2 1 May 2003; 30 (2): 5–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/019…
Inauguration Day 2001
Research Article| February 01 2002 Inauguration Day 2001 Hortense J. Spillers Hortense J. Spillers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2002) 29 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-29-1-1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Hortense J. Spillers; Inauguration Day 2001. boundary 2 1 February 2002; 29 (1): 1–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/019036…
Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique
Susan Lurie, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Tania Modleski, Hortense Spillers, Carla Kaplan, Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique, Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 679-707
All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race
When I was young and free and used to wear silksl (and sat in the front pew, left of center, I might add), I used to think that my childhood minister occasionally made the oddest announcement. Whenever any one of our three church choirs was invited to perform at another congregation, our minister, suspecting that several of his members would stay home or do something else that afternoon, having already spent some hours at worship, skillfully anti…
All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race
Black Popular Culture
Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987)
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book
Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" is a foundational text in Black feminist thought and cultural studies. Published in Diacritics in 1987, the essay explores the impact of slavery and its aftermath on the formation of Black subjectivity, particularly focusing on the ways in which kinship structures and gender roles were disrupted and reconfigured. Spillers argues that the transatlantic slave trade created a …
All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race
The Idea of Black Culture
The Idea of Black Culture Hortense J. Spillers (bio) A return to the idea of black culture must be considered today in a critical climate that is not hospitable to the topic, even though hospitality and accommodation have never been attributes of the context in which the idea was either engendered or understood. An aspect of the problematic for the investigator, then, is to get in sight a horizon of inquiry that will enable, if not necessarily vo…
All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race
When I was young and free and used to wear silksl (and sat in the front pew, left of center, I might add), I used to think that my childhood minister occasionally made the oddest announcement. Whenever any one of our three church choirs was invited to perform at another congregation, our minister, suspecting that several of his members would stay home or do something else that afternoon, having already spent some hours at worship, skillfully anti…
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date
Time and Crisis: Questions for Psychoanalysis and Race
In the triumvirate of personalities and motives—from Wright and Baldwin to Coates—we encounter the essential elements of the “crisis” that configures black passage in the New World. These lines of kinship, both consanguineous and ineffable, travelling from father to son, from uncle to nephew, from one generation to the next, lend us a figurative rhythm that grasps the notion of the processional—the traversal of time and space that remains fundame…
Expostulations and Replies
In this lively intellectual exchange—occasioned in part by the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Hortense Spillers’s revolutionary essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”—the renowned black feminist theorist responds to eleven questions posed by Ann duCille, guest editor of a special issue of differences on “black marriage.” Their exchange ranges from the meaning of marriage in the throes and wake of slavery to Spill…
Views of the East Wing: On Michelle Obama
The institution of First Lady is ripe for an overhaul, and Michelle Obama is just the woman to deliver. Already a sensation of the fashion world and of the beautifully sculpted arms, the tall, stri
A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love
Martin Luther King and the Style of the Black Sermon
Formalism Comes to Harlem
692 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 692-697© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 692 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS 693 Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 693 694 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 694 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS 695 Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 695 696 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 696…
Kinship and Resemblances: Women on Women
A Moment of Protest Becomes a Curricular Object
A speech delivered as the keynote address at Brandeis University's AAAS 50th Anniversary, where Hortense Spillers received Brandeis University's Alumni Achievement Award on February 11, 2019.1
Art Talk and the Uses of History
In a reading of Huey Copeland's Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, Spillers examines the stakes and implications of the work against the broader perspective of black artistic practices in the sociopolitical context of the United States. Looking in detail at aspects of Copeland's quartet of painters, she brings questions of aesthetics alongside present-day political concerns
Long Time”: Last Daughters and the New “New South”
This essay looks at aspects of new southern culture against the backdrop of the 2007 Supreme Court ruling on school desegregation and its impact on our understanding of the sixties. Incorporating two book reviews, the essay argues that the “long” perspective on the period of radical change would suggest that the sixties were not only not a “failure” but in certain respects loom ahead of us
Introduction: The Still Vacillating Equilibrium of the World
We would like to thank Paul Bové and the editors of boundary 2 for their encouragement and support. Special thanks go to John Beverley, sixties man, not only for his work as author, editor, translator, and facilitator for this issue, but for an exemplary and inspiring career of committed, critical, and self-critical scholarship
Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique
Susan Lurie, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Tania Modleski, Hortense Spillers, Carla Kaplan, Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique, Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 679-707
Moving on Down the Line
Letters
Martin Luther King and the Style of the Black Sermon
A Lament
A Day in the Life of Civil Rights
(1978). A Day in the Life of Civil Rights. The Black Scholar: Vol. 9, The 1960's, pp. 20-27
Lorraine Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light." Special Issue of "Freedomways". Vol. 19, No. 4 (1979) . Jean Carey Bond , Lorraine Hansberry
Formalism Comes to Harlem
692 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 692-697© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 692 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS 693 Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 693 694 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 694 HORTENSE J. SPILLERS 695 Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 695 696 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Spillers_Spillers 2/14/2018 5:10 PM Page 696…
A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love
Turning the Century: Notes on Women and Difference
Black/Female/Critic
Kinship and Resemblances: Women on Women
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book
Hortense Spillers's "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" is a foundational text in Black feminist thought and cultural studies. Published in Diacritics in 1987, the essay explores the impact of slavery and its aftermath on the formation of Black subjectivity, particularly focusing on the ways in which kinship structures and gender roles were disrupted and reconfigured. Spillers argues that the transatlantic slave trade created a …
Feminist Differings: Recent Surveys of Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism
Black Women Writers' Right to Write
Moving on Down the Line
New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History
Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text
What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumptions known to us as America? Since the hemisphere actually encompasses a variety of national identities, can it make sense to speak of a unified American identity? Can a place for marginalized identities be established within the cultural mainstream? Comparative Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of New World cultural identities, questions and problems. The essays attempt to locate America as a cu…
Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987)
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date
Black Popular Culture
All the Things You Could be by Now, If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race
When I was young and free and used to wear silksl (and sat in the front pew, left of center, I might add), I used to think that my childhood minister occasionally made the oddest announcement. Whenever any one of our three church choirs was invited to perform at another congregation, our minister, suspecting that several of his members would stay home or do something else that afternoon, having already spent some hours at worship, skillfully anti…
All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race
Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique
Susan Lurie, Ann Cvetkovich, Jane Gallop, Tania Modleski, Hortense Spillers, Carla Kaplan, Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique, Feminist Studies, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 679-707
Inauguration Day 2001
Research Article| February 01 2002 Inauguration Day 2001 Hortense J. Spillers Hortense J. Spillers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2002) 29 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-29-1-1 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Hortense J. Spillers; Inauguration Day 2001. boundary 2 1 February 2002; 29 (1): 1–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/019036…
Travelling with Faulkner
The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Today
Research Article| May 01 2003 “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Today Hortense J. Spillers Hortense J. Spillers Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2003) 30 (2): 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-30-2-5 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Hortense J. Spillers; “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Today. boundary 2 1 May 2003; 30 (2): 5–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/019…
Art (21 works) · History (18 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Political science (14 works) · Race, History, and American Society (12 works) · Law (11 works) · History (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Literature (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)