Black, White, and in Color - 2nd Edition by Hortense J Spillers (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A landmark, career-spanning collection by a critic whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr. lauded as "a major thinker"

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project.

Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

From the Back Cover

Black, White, and in Color offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past twenty years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act-one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project.

Spillers is best known for her race-centered revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the essays collected in Black, White, and in Color all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature will want to read them.

Review Quotes

"For anyone who is interested in African American culture, or women's writing, this collection will be indispensable. For anyone who is interested in an original review of the works of Ralph Ellison, Harry Cruse, Gwendolyn Brooks, among others, this book will provide some fascinating readings. . . . Spillers' subtle blending of race theory and gender theory is as inspiring as it is sharp. The eclecticism of the selected works is offset by a stirringly original style, a depth of passion for her subject, and a bountiful offering of fresh ideas that will continue to help the evolution of the way academics look at race and gender."--Adrain Smith "Cercles"

"For anyone who is interested in African-American culture, or women's writing, this collection of essays will be indispensable."--David Marriott "Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory"

"Hortense Spillers has been one of the central shaping forces in African American feminist theory and criticism for the past two decades. Each of us in the field--both colleagues and students--has profited greatly from her bold, insightful, and original interpretations of what it means to be black and a woman and dare to speak or write. Spillers's voice has played such a fundamental part in contemporary critical discourse that one can hardly believe that her work has not been collected before. But Black, White, and in Color was well worth the wait. Its publication only reaffirms Spillers's pivotal role as a major thinker in African American letters and literary theory."--Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University

"Hortense Spillers wrote many of the essays in this long-deserved collection during a period in which Black Studies departments were springing up across the country and black academics were 'called upon to hit the ground, already running. . . to establish the game and play it at once.' Spillers faithfully attempted both feats and as this volume shows, she not only excelled at the game early and impressively but continued to develop new moves. . . . The legacy of Spillers's career, however, certainly doesn't reside in the quaint conclusion that Black Studies is important per se, but that, as a more recently heralded or authorized tradition of thought in the academy, it continues to inform our shared experience of literature and life in still unexpected and necessary ways."--Boston Review-- "Boston Review"

"The essays in this long-awaited new collection open pivotal spaces--both terrestrial and celestial--in the firmament of literary criticism. Altering forever the direction of African American studies and feminist theory, Black, White, and in Color also provides a crucial phenomenology for thinking about black female invisibility and the hard facts of American history. This is a powerful and invaluable book."--Patricia Yaeger, University of Michigan

"To call this book essential on any syllabus of women's studies, African-American studies or any course on the history of the United States would be a genuine step in the right direction."--Chris Mansel "Reviews/Earthlink.Net"

About the Author

Hortense J. Spillers is the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of English at Cornell University. She is the editor of Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text and coeditor of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition.