Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text

by Hortense Spillers (Editor)

What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumptions known to us as "America?" Since the American 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 American Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of "New World" cultural identities, questions and problems. The essays attempt to locate "America" as a cultural and historical site of plurality and division, a discursive space of multiple differences which becomes, paradoxically, the ground for a new notion of American unity.

Genres: Race, Anthologies, Nonfiction

206 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 1991

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

[seth]

Hortense Spillers is the most formidable literary critic I’ve ever read and would argue to ever live in this “America”. It’s absolutely incredible what she does w Marti, Hegel, and Faulkner in 9 pages. She uses their ideas to advance thought, not only a claim but the literal expanse of thought. How we do it, why we do it, how it has been deployed and to what end. “The historic triangular trade interlarded a third of the known world in a fabric of commercial intimacy so tightly interwoven that the politics of the new world cannot always be so easily disentangled as locally discreet moments” (9) and she’s not even talking about slavery fr!!! Could you imagine writing a sentence so carefully exact? She’s talking about the onto-epistemic investments we (the we here tends to be the direct descendants of Europeans, albeit “people of color” have gotten entangled with this project as well) hold so dear in order to make coherent an “America” that is at its root inconceivable and discursive in formation. It’s 6am on the January first 2025. New year and not a new me it seems. I only read the Spillers essay but I’m marking this as a read bc it feels only fair. I’ll get to the Mae Henderson and Berlant ones later.

[Matt Sautman]

This anthology of essays explores national identity in relation to race and sexuality. While many ideas present in the anthology are provocative and are presented by brilliant scholars, like Spillers, Berlant, and Warner, the prose style itself can occasional obfuscate the radicalness of the ideas here.

[Hemani]

Spillers is one of the most provocative, innovative scholars of identity and difference for our time.