Introduction for Hortense Spillers

I would like to begin by thanking Dr. Charles Rowell, Callaloo, and Texas A&M for hosting this wonderful gathering. It is a privilege and a pleasure to introduce Hortense Spillers, one of the vanguards in literary studies whose seminal essays have transformed how we practice literary criticism in the academy today. Intersectionality may be one of the catechisms of the humanities now, but long before it became a buzzword, it was Hortense Spillers who, beginning in the early 1980s, gave us some of the first glimpses of what that kind of critical practice looked like on the page. Her essays are among the first critical studies to prize the intersections of race and gender and also of race and psychoanalysis in understanding African American life and culture. Essays like “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” and “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother” are now among some of the most referenced essays in our field—and not simply because those essays got there first and filled a gaping lacunae in our thinking, but moreover because they continue to exemplify the best of the critical essay genre itself. They are capacious in their thinking and subtle in argumentation; they contravene established perspectives and allow new revelations and self-revelations. And not just the frequently cited essays, but also several others on black homiletics, on the role of the creative intellectual, on the pathways of black cuisine, on the works of luminaries such as Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. All of these essays stand out for the way they refuse easy summation and encourage engaged analysis instead.

Of course, even now, to boldly articulate a black feminist voice in the academy is a challenge and a feat, let alone in the early 1980s when Spillers began her daring enterprise. There is an observation that Toni Morrison makes in her 1989 essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” which to me aptly characterizes Spillers’s intervention. Writing about the fiercely contested terrain of literary studies in the 1980s, Morrison writes: “Silences are being broken, lost things have been found and at least two generations of scholars are disentangling received knowledge from the apparatus of control” (8). Certainly Morrison’s words resonate in characterizing Spillers’s practice, which has transgressed the silences and the exclusionary protocols of knowledge production. What Spillers has done instead is give us—as she says—”a new grammar” that is less concerned with pinning down black life and culture to a word or a phrase and more interested in articulating the complex networks—historical, cultural, literary networks—that have shaped, and continue to shape, the contours of—another phrase of hers—”intramural black life.”

Let me conjure up Spillers’s work with her own words, words that are particularly germane at a Callaloo gathering, words that put in relief the rich texture of Professor Spillers’s thinking. Surely, one could go to any of her essays and come away with a new depth of perception. But given that this is a Callaloo gathering—and thus bearing in mind both the meaning of the word “callaloo” and also the journal’s enterprise—I found a passage so choice for the moment. It comes from a little-referenced essay entitled “Peter’s Pans: Eating in the Diaspora,” the introductory essay to Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Like many a Spillers essay, “Peter’s Pans” is a lengthy meditation, indeed long enough to be a short book. The first half traces the work she’s done so far and reveals, if you will, the scaffolding of those pioneering essays; the latter half gestures towards future inquiries, and is best encapsulated in the passage I wish to quote at length. Notice how fresh her readings are, the sumptuous interplay between the personal and the collective, the theoretical and the tactile, and the intellectual and the edible:

These notes actually comprise the first blush of research protocol on this topic that began for me as a traveler’s curiosity—completing in the mid-seventies, my first meal of a...