Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture

by Hortense Spillers

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project.

Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

Genres: Race, Essays, Nonfiction, Theory, Feminism, Philosophy, Literary Criticism

570 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Hortense Spillers is a 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.

Reviews

[Tia]

Seventh read of “Mama’s Baby” and it’s more comfortable now, even though I notice something new every time. I can’t say any of the other essays went down as easily—Spillers doesn’t write toward a thesis so much as perhaps 30 of them at once. I was often lost but then awakened by moments of intense excitement and circling and underlining. But still—a challenge to which I’m not sure I measured up.

[Marissa]

Done comps readings!!

[GAB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haar kritiek op feminisme is nog steeds relevant!

[Mill gee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spillers is different gravy

[Robert Wood · Rating 4 out of 5]

worth the read, especially for the later essays. The critique of radical feminism in Interstices should be taught in more classes, and the essays everyone references are incredible.

[Sanjay Varma]

I read only one essay from this book, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe." I don't read much sociology, or much linguistic analysis of culture. Overall, this essay applied Foucault's ideas, about words equating to power and defining reality, to the identity of black women in African and American societies since 1500. Here's my summary:

1. The Daniel Patrick Moynihan essay from 1972 on the black family, identifies the problem that black families are led by mothers, while mainstream American society is based on families with fathers. Spillers turns this claim on its head by saying that, in effect, Moynihan has blamed black mothers for causing the problems in the black community. In addition, he has centered "normal" on the nuclear family structure, which Spillers describes as white culture.
2. When Europeans first interacted with Africans in the 1500s, they defined blacks as lacking any civilization and culture, and described black bodies as hideous and ugly.
3. Far fewer female slaves were transported across the North Atlantic. One would expect that black culture would initially be very male-centric but, since black bodies were treated exclusively as property and not as people, blacks became un-gendered.
4. As Frederick Douglass has detailed, black children were separated at an early age from their mothers, which meant the black community had weaker kinship connections.
5. As Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl described, white female slaveowners did not establish a solidarity with black female slaves. They allowed rapes to occur and then blamed and tormented the black female slaves for the actions of their husbands.

The essay ends with the author making some conclusions about words and language. I did not understand this part, i.e. the linguistic analysis. She concludes that the words used in the past 500 years to describe black women, and the conditions in which they blacks were held, have caused Moynihan to misdiagnose the problems in the black family.

[Georgia · Rating 5 out of 5]

read "All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race." truly a wonderful wonderful essay. best read while listening to the Charles Mingus song of the same name

[Seth Shimelfarb-Wells · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will spend my whole weekend reading one essay.

[Miyona Katayama · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spillers' style will change the way you think. Great writing with great images, musical sentences, unflinching honesty.

[Laura Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have often referred to Spillers as "my favorite critic" and her work had a huge impact on my undergrad honors thesis.

[Tapji Garba · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic!

[Ashon · Rating 5 out of 5]

incomparable.