Description: 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.Brief description: 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.
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"