Hortense Spillers
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Recent papers in Hortense Spillers
This article argues that Freud's account of binary sexual difference, articulated in the Oedipus complex, is conditioned by a history of racial capitalism. Turning to the foundational work of Hortense Spillers on gender and Atlantic race... more
This essay takes the notion of “flesh” as the point of departure for exploring the viability and contemporary relevance of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “ontological psychoanalysis”. Primary interlocutors will be Octavia... more
The article explores claims of resistance and ambivalence in discourses of feminisms. By contemplating these two terms as they are positioned in different feminist articulations (as well as in black critical theory, psychoanalysis, and... more
The environments built by racial regimes are not only hostile they are liable, Cedric Robinson teaches us, to “collapse under the weight of their own artifices”. This chapter draws on Robinson’s insight to reconsider the recent interest... more
There is much in Hortense Spillers's work to celebrate—from black feminism to literary criticism. One of her crucial contributions, however, has received little, if any, scholarly attention. Calvin Warren calls this a black discourse... more
This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as 'an unfolding archive'. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies,... more
Afropessimism incites controversy within and without the academy for the provocation that modernity's ethical life, including its purportedly progressive facets, is entirely undergirded by a rejection of blackness. On this basis it... more
This meditation is an experimentation with Hortense Spiller’s concept of 'psychoanalytics.' It considers the hieroglyph a repetitive and enacted (but unrepresentable) force of historical trauma marking black bodies and... more
A long-standing effort has been made by critical race theorists to bring awareness to the reciprocal operations of culture and racism. In Toward the African Revolution, Frantz Fanon interrogates racism as the “most visible” and “crudest... more
In "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, " Hortense Spillers draws a parallel between the discursive and material field of violence that assisted in the production of the captive body. She asks: "We might well ask if this... more
This article meditates on black unbelonging as the haunting impasse reached when attempting to wrest a phenomenological account of black life amid perpetual black death. It seeks to expose the calculated dislocation of black modes of... more
In this essay I read Requiem as an anxious and regressive rewriting of the historical contradictions contained under what Hortense Spillers calls “the sign of race” previously worked through in Faulkner’s earlier and more critically... more
In this conversation, Andrew Cutrone and Marquis Bey discuss Bey's recent monograph, Black Trans Feminism (2022) in the context of citation practices, black and trans feminist practice and theory, “radical‐radical thinking,” and fugitivity.
Este artigo demonstrará o potencial indisciplinar do que definiremos como escritas insubmissas da história. Isso será feito em dois momentos: inicialmente através da procura de Hortense Spillers por uma "nova gramática", capaz de... more
Este artigo demonstrará o potencial indisciplinar do que definiremos como escritas insubmissas da história. Isso será feito em dois momentos: inicialmente através da procura de Hortense Spillers por uma "nova gramática", capaz de... more
A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we are trained to think, has destructive effects whose ghostly lingerings can, nevertheless, be durably turned into ancestors. But what if we got... more
En 1983, Cedric J. Robinson introduit sous le titre d’une « tradition radicale noire », l’idée d’une généalogie spécifiquement africaine de la lutte contre l’esclavagisme, le capitalisme et l’impérialisme, distincte du marxisme européen.... more
I suggest that transposing Euripides's myth into modern black contexts often endows ancient Greek drama with epistemological primacy, whether seeking the "universal" redemption it has long exemplified, or resisting that primacy through... more
As part of his 1975 solo debut album, Água do céu-pássaro, Ney Matogrosso recorded a cover of "Barco negro," a Portuguese fado made famous by Amália Rodrigues and based on an earlier Brazilian song, "Mãe-preta,"... more
Using film, television, archival materials, and new media art, this dissertation asks how politically enforced constraints on Black being--especially the origination of racial blackness in slavery and the ongoing availability of Black... more
In this article, we ask: "how does race matter when working with intersectional feminism in a postcolonial Nordic context?" We take our cue from feminist and postcolonial scholars who have pointed out that minoritisation and... more
Many slaveholders attempted to justify the institution of slavery in the United States by claiming that the practice of slavery was actually in the interests of the slaves themselves. Not only are these arguments invalid because they... more
In this paper, I read Derrida's “The Animal That Therefore I Am” through the theoretical framework that Hortense Spillers offers in her 1987 canonical essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” and through the black... more
The interlocking pattern of ownership of the means of ideological production and the means of carceral labor extraction in effect assures cinema will be loyal to the same institutions and power structures that support the prison... more
In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs ‘white innocence’ and its attempts at witnessing the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of critical race theorists we put... more
1. Las particularidades de la contabilidad administrativa • Definición: Su técnica está basada en la utilidad que proporciona de información interna y externa. Está más interesada en los detalles, dirigiéndose a reportar las actividades... more
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd on the 25th of May 2020 in the city of Minneapolis, a global anti-racist rupture in the fabric of racial capitalism has occurred. Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on... more
This essay explores the method of close reading as a critical strategy for feminist classrooms, especially when focused on the foundational violence of anti-Blackness and coloniality. Through a personal reflection on my own efforts to... more
This essay aspires to put in contact two contemporary movements in radical political thought. The first is Afro-pessimism, coined by political theorist Frank B. Wilderson III, to name a set of thinkers who theorize racial slavery as... more
As part of his 1975 solo debut album, Água do céu-pássaro, Ney Matogrosso recorded a cover of "Barco negro," a Portuguese fado made famous by Amália Rodrigues and based on an earlier Brazilian song, "Mãe-preta," written by Caco Velho and... more