The Idea of Black Culture

Informationen zum Autor Hortense Spillers is Professor of Literature at Cornell. She is currently chair of the African-American section of the MLA; she is a regular participant in the celebrated School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell, a Norton Editor (with Gates on the Norton Anthology of African Americna Literature, and a contributor to the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-century Black Women Writers; her latest work, forthcoming from U of Chicago Press, was recently the subject of a mini-conference at U Pennsylvania. Her publications include: Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition (1985); Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991). Klappentext Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY): Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South. 1) Black culture as a discursive field-in fact, of intersecting discursive fields-self-consciously pursues the question of origins, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the motive idea of black culture is advanced as an oppositional form, its theoreticians have had to decide not only what it excludes (is the logic of choice already decided in this case?), but what it must exclude, relative to an absolute beginning, often embodied in a wide array of symbolic and figurative devices summed up as Africa. It is important to insist on a distinction here between the massive geopolitical complex of the African continent, with particular reference to Subsaharan Africa, and the plethora of poetics attendant upon literary notions of Africa, which frequencies are not only not synonymous and commensurate, but describe different orders of cases entirely; often enough, these realms of attention are elided as if they were twina. The question of genesis is by far the most prestigious problematic of scholarship and writing on the culture of black life-worlds, inasmuch as any given moment of social and political practice is predicated, even when implicitly emergent, on where the culture comes from; the current Afrocentric fashion in the United States, for example, is not new, though many of its tenets and tonalities have been redrafted as a contemporary response to the mid-century movements in Civil Rights and the Black Nationalist resurgence subsequent to it. Afrocentric theory has never dominated the field of cultural explanation, but it is fair to say that it has always been a contender, solidly poised against integrationist/assimilationist appeals on the one hand and nationalist/separatist/essentialist claims on the other. Much of the writing about the black culture problematic tends to poach on the ground of its nearest textual and contextual neighbors-history, politics, and economics-and can hardly be imagined without reference to race as theory, as interlinked material practices, as the bane or boon of public polic...

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Hortense Spillers is Professor of Literature at Cornell. She is currently chair of the African-American section of the MLA; she is a regular participant in the celebrated School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell, a Norton Editor (with Gates on the Norton Anthology of African Americna Literature, and a contributor to the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-century Black Women Writers; her latest work, forthcoming from U of Chicago Press, was recently the subject of a mini-conference at U Pennsylvania. Her publications include: Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition (1985); Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text (1991).

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Main blurb (for internal use only - CHECK BEFORE USING IN PRINTED PUBLICITY):
Hortense Spillers's THE IDEA OF BLACK CULTURE will consist of six chapters, described below, in some detail (she has supplied more detail than I give here). Her book exploits Eagleton's successful title, and like Eagleton's book, grounds its subject (but more thoroughly) in its history. The engagement here - the controversy, as to what can be meant by the term 'Black Culture' and the necessity to bear witness to history - will run through her several strands of argument. More obviously in her sights, in her concluding chapter, are those people (treasonable clerks), like Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Cornel West, who, in her view - have used African-American/Black Studies to their own financial ends, usurping and exploiting their history in a cult of personality. Spillers is an eminent and adversarial figure, acquainted personally with many of the greats of African-American culture. Her work bears steady witness to the plight of African-Americans, to the full history of slavery, North (she has written in her latest book on the horrific breeding farms in Massachusetts) and South.

1) Black culture as a discursive field-in fact, of intersecting discursive fields-self-consciously pursues the question of origins, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the motive idea of black culture is advanced as an oppositional form, its theoreticians have had to decide not only what it excludes (is the logic of choice already decided in this case?), but what it must exclude, relative to an absolute beginning, often embodied in a wide array of symbolic and figurative devices summed up as Africa. It is important to insist on a distinction here between the massive geopolitical complex of the African continent, with particular reference to Subsaharan Africa, and the plethora of poetics attendant upon literary notions of Africa, which frequencies are not only not synonymous and commensurate, but describe different orders of cases entirely; often enough, these realms of attention are elided as if they were twina.
The question of genesis is by far the most prestigious problematic of scholarship and writing on the culture of black life-worlds, inasmuch as any given moment of social and political practice is predicated, even when implicitly emergent, on where the culture comes from; the current Afrocentric fashion in the United States, for example, is not new, though many of its tenets and tonalities have been redrafted as a contemporary response to the mid-century movements in Civil Rights and the Black Nationalist resurgence subsequent to it. Afrocentric theory has never dominated the field of cultural explanation, but it is fair to say that it has always been a contender, solidly poised against integrationist/assimilationist appeals on the one hand and nationalist/separatist/essentialist claims on the other.
Much of the writing about the black culture problematic tends to poach on the ground of its nearest textual and contextual neighbors-history, politics, and economics-and can hardly be imagined without reference to race as theory, as interlinked material practices, as the bane or boon of public policy and address. In (more or less) monolingual communities, as in the United States an…