Flesh of the Matter

Margo Natalie Crawford is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.C. Riley Snorton is the Mary R. Morton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.

• Introduction: On GatheringMargo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton[Archival Fragment 1: Calendar entry of The Scholar and the Feminist Conference]On Thon, or, Thinking Gender in the IntersticeC. Riley SnortonOracular Fever Medicine: A Time Travel Oracle for Hortense SpillersAlexis Pauline GumbsThe Fineness of a Sentence, or, Hortense Spillers’s Theoretical AcuityKevin Quashie[Archival Fragment 2: A letter from Toni Morrison to Hortense Spillers, 1984]When Hortense Spillers and Toni Morrison Meet in the Clearing: The Hieroglyphics of Marking and UnmarkingMargo Natalie CrawfordPerformance and PreformanceFred Moten[Archival Fragment 3: Journal entry on Gwendolyn Brooks]Black Reconstruction, or, Names for Love: Hortense Spillers as ReaderAnthony ReedThe Critic Draws: Between a Body and a BuildingAmaris Brown“whatever marvels of my own inventiveness”: Black Feminist Archival Tradition in the Notebooks of Hortense SpillersKiana T. MurphyAll the Things You Could Be by Now if Hortense Spillers Was Your MentorNicole Adeyinka Spigner[Archival Fragment 4: Images of Hortense Spillers in her living room]The Black Living RoomShoniqua Roach[Archival Fragment 5: Journal entry, 1970]Mama’s Marvelous Tar Baby: Black Feminist Experiments in Spillersian EcdysisRa Malika Imhotep[Archival Fragment 6: Sparebone program][Archival Fragment 7: Letter to Hortense Spillers that names Deborah McDowell and Cheryl Wall]Grammars and Impression Points: Appreciating Hortense SpillersDeborah McDowellBridging Figurations: Hortense J. Spillers, EssayistThadious M. Davis[Archival Fragment 8: In the Flesh, handwritten talk]All the Things You Could Be and All the Things You AreSharon P. Holland[Archival Fragment 9: Handwritten album list in Spillers’s journal]NotesContributor BiographiesIndex

“As an inspired collection of essays illuminating nearly fifty years of the field-defining 'word work' (à la Kevin Quashie) of Hortense Spillers, The Flesh of the Matter is a tour-de-force twice over, from its choice of the eminent, much-read, most-cited Black feminist theorist as its subject par excellence, to its innovative methodology—a kind of archival archeology featuring a generative interplay between Spillers's published scholarship and the gems of genius to be plumbed from within her collected, catalogued, and digitized papers. Drawing from early drafts of Spillers's monumental essays, from notebook, diary and date-book entries, lecture notes, poetry and philosophical musings, marginalia and letters from the likes of Judith Butler and Toni Morrison, this first-of-its kind anthology explores the interstices of Spillers's oeuvre, demonstrating for readers and researchers the importance of archives like the Pembroke Center's Black Feminist Theory Collections in preserving for future generations the foundational labors that helped think and write fields into being, while also enabling the production of new knowledges, creations, and collaborations."—Ann duCille, author of Technicolored: Reflections on Race in the Time of TV and Mary Murphy, Nancy L. Buc ’65 Pembroke Center Archivist at Brown University