The publications of Hortense Spillers’ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book and Toni Morrison’s Beloved marks 1987 as an important year in the history of black textual production. Without planning, Morrison teaches us how to read Spillers and Spillers to read Morrison, despite differences in form. Spillers articulates a.
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Spillers in her monumental essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.”1 Drawing from Spillers, I mark the specific moment at which the ungendered complexity of black female flesh emerges as both a problem for thought and a problem for materiality. I argue that it is not the black female body but the material.
As my title implies, I am indebted in my critical approach to Hortense Spillers’ ever-suggestive 1987 essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Raising the issues of paternal presence and absence with which I will be concerned, Spillers argues that in African American slavery “a dual fatherhood is set in motion.
In her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”, Hortense Spillers argues that the gendered configuration for Black people through slavery and its afterlife is “the dehumanizing, ungendering, defacing project of African persons” (Ziyad, 2017).
Rizvana Bradley Yale University PDF.with a black candidate already stained by the figurations of blackness as sexual aggressiveness, or rapaciousness or impotence, the stain need only be proved reasonably doubted, which is to say, if he is black how can you tell if that really is a stain? Which is also to say, blackness is itself a stain, and therefore unstainable. Which is also to say, if.
But as Hortense Spillers explicates in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” the black woman’s peculiar relationship to the United States of America depends on a tenuous relationship to biological modes of kinship, but that relationship must not determine her claim to national belonging. As lady in brown instructs.
I chose foundational authors, pioneers in their proposals such as Hortense Spillers to think about blackness and gender; Chela Sandoval to understand the tactical oppositional consciousness of US third world feminist; and Donna Haraway to reflect on gender (or the abdication of it) in a context of global capitalism. First stop. Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987).
The nuclear “family,” which, as the feminist literary scholar Hortense Spillers famously argued in her groundbreaking 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” is a discursive and ideological institution deeply implicated by histories of white supremacy and racist violence, has also and as a result been a.
In her essay entitled “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers uses a similar approach to unpack the complex position of African American women in American ideology. Spillers opens her argument by refuting the notion that gender identities and gender dominance are inherent. She points to the Moynihan.
View Essay - Arnell Calderon - American Soul - Paper 1.docx from LITERARY STUDIES LLSL 2406 at The New School. Calderon 1 Arnell Calderon Professor Simone White American Soul 24 March.
Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Female. This essay is dedicated to the contemporary movement of Black Lives Matter. Hortense J. Spillers equates the transportation to the New World as the theft of bodies, which began the process of degendering the BlackBlack body. See Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2, Culture and Countermemory: The.
This article centers Saidiya Hartman's and Hortense Spillers' theorizations of Black fungibility as well as two speculative visual works in order to read Black bodies on plantation landscapes as symbols.
The critical position Best elaborates could sound like aesthetic difficulty. 6 It might also sound like an extension of postmodernist constructivism. It is, in fact, opposed to both. None Like Us resists the ways that modernist difficulty has tended to produce insiders and outsiders, and so avoids precisely the kinds of subjectivities (intellectual, knowing, critical, self-conscious.
The Breeding Ground 3 are the same. One means of avoiding this harmful slippage is to take a historical approach in the analysis of motherhood, so that mother-ing may be placed within the context of the numerous events and issues that effect how and why one mothers or does not mother. However, object relations theorist Nancy Chodorow appears to.In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987), Spillers reminds us that slavery doesn’t only take violent and murderous forms, but also has more symbolic manifestations, such as the more or less general reduction of black being to a corpus defined as flesh as value.This essay explores notions of maternal desire within feminist psychoanalysis with an interest in challenging heteronormative frameworks of analysis. Providing close critical readings of texts by Jessica Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, Kaja Silverman and Hortense Spillers, I trace conceptual openings through which to interpret maternal sexuality as a.