Hortense Spillers
| Hortense Spillers | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1942 |
| Education | B.A, University of Memphis, 1964; M.A. in 1966; Ph.D in English, Brandeis University, 1974. |
| Occupation | Professor, literary critic, feminist scholar |
| Employer | Vanderbilt University |
| Known for | Essays on African-American literature |
| Notable work | "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book", 1987; Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, 1991 |
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.
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. She has held positions at Haverford College, Wellesley College, Emory University, and Cornell University. Her work has been recognized with awards from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.
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. 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. Spillers is concerned with the alleged problem of matriarchal family structure in black communities. However, rather than accepting the wisdom of the Moynihan Report (which established the trope of the absent black father), Spillers makes two moves--one historical and the other political. First, she argues that the absent father in African American history is the white slave master, since legally the child followed the condition of the mother. Thus, the enslaved mother was always positioned as a father, as the one from whom children inherited their names and social status. Similarly, black men and women were both positioned as "vulnerable, supine bod[ies]" capable of being "invaded/raided" by a woman or man (77) --that is as "ungendered" (68) and separated from its own "active desire" (68). After suggesting that this lineage removes African Americans from patriarchal gender and places them outside of family, she concludes by suggesting that men and women descended from this situation might be well positioned to overturn patriarchy, not by joining the ranks of normative gender but by operating from the androgynous "boundary" (74) where they have been placed--that is, by black men's saying "'yes' to the 'female' within" and by black women "claiming the monstrosity of a female with the power to name" (80). In a 2006 interview entitled, “Whatcha Gonna Do?—Revisiting Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” Spillers was interviewed by Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Jennifer L. Morgan, and Shelly Eversley. In that interview Spillers shares insight into her writing process. She states that she wrote “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” with a sense of hopelessness. She was in part writing in response to All the Men are Black all the Women are White but Some of Us are Brave. Spillers was writing to a moment in history where the importance of black women in critical theory was being denied. She wrote with a sense of urgency in order to create a theoretical taxonomy for black women to be studied in the academy.
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