Customer Reviews

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

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The publication of Prof. Spillers' book hopefully signals a more widespread dissemination of her extraordinary intellectual and imaginative work. Bringing together some very familiar (and endlessly cited) essays, such as "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe...", as well as essays from more obscure locations, and unpublished work, 'Black, White, and in Color...' illuminates Prof. Spillers' resolutely unorthodox and powerful thinking around the racialization and gendering of the brutal history of the United States, from the genocide of American Indians to the enslavement of Africans in the "New World". She brings a vast historical knowledge to bear on her brilliantly idiosyncratic literary critical enterprise. The ways in which she intertwines feminisms, psychoanalysis, and literature, and then proceeds to re-weave them, stuns. Edmund Burke is an influence, and she turns the latter, canonical critic's ideas upside down such that Burke and William Faulkner can never be seen the same way again. Though finding occasional recourse to post-structuralism, Spillers is, in no way, an acolyte of Derrida and his followers. This is an indispensable book which, had it not appeared, would have to be written. It follows Marx's injunction to carry out "a ruthless critique of all that exists".

At close to 600pp., this book is a magisterial collection of several of the most important essays in literary and cultural criticism to appear in recent years. And not "only" literary and cultural criticism but various domains of interdisciplinary thinking harbored therein: black feminism, Southern studies, auto-ethnographic critique, and social theory, among others.

Spillers's inventive analytical insight has been justly celebrated over the years. This book at once pays tribute to that legacy of critical acumen and *expands* on it by virtue of a long introductory essay (titled "Peter's Pans"), which announces Spillers's turn toward postcolonial and diasporic materiality, as well as an organizing frame that highlights the interrelationships among the essays. It is truly a wonder to behold a seemingly "familiar" essay like "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," originally published in 1987, in light of her more recent "All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother." Somehow reading the two closely together generates resonances that lend further critical force to Spillers's thoughts on race, gender, psychoanalysis, embodiment, and what it means to be "in the flesh." In other words, this book offers a "layering" of thought which does justice to the abiding themes and concerns of Spillers's criticism.

It's worth pointing out that this book contains significant revisions to several essays, which further underscores the fact that simply reading them in their originally published forums doesn't quite arrive at the critical effect I describe above. The collection is already a standard reference point for scholars in many fields of humanistic inquiry; I cannot recommend it highly enough to interested, and vested, readers.