The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers [Hardcover]

PROSE Awards Category Winner—Media and Cultural Studies, 2025

Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies.

Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton,The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillersis the first collection to take up directly how Spillers’s writing on literature, culture, and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought, as well as countless other areas of the academy. Interspersed with archival fragments from Spillers’s papers kept at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Thought at Brown University, the fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us, the nomenclature of enslavement keyed into the American lexicon, and the ways that history permeates our cultural boundaries today.Critical essays and archival fragments focusing on the impacts of Hortense Spillers’s writing on literature, culture, and theory“As an inspired collection of essays illuminating nearly fifty years of the field-defining 'word work' (à la Kevin Quashie) of Hortense Spillers, The Flesh of the Matter is a tour-de-force twice over, from its choice of the eminent, much-read, most-cited Black feminist theorist as its subject par excellence, to its innovative methodology—a kind of archival archeology featuring a generative interplay between Spillers's published scholarship and the gems of genius to be plumbed from within her collected, catalogued, and digitized papers. Drawing from early drafts of Spillers's monumental essays, from notebook, diary and date-book entries, lecture notes, poetry al–