The Flesh of the Matter

<b>PROSE Awards Category Winner-Media and Cultural Studies 2025</b><br> <br> Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article Mama's Baby Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies.<br> <br> Edited by Margo Natalie Crawford and C. Riley Snorton <i>The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers</i> is the first collection to take up directly how Spillers's writing on literature culture and theory have been signal posts to the varied and universal threads of Black thought as well as countless other areas of the academy. Interspersed with archival fragments from Spillers's papers kept at the Pembroke Center for Feminist Thought at Brown University the fourteen essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us the nomenclature of enslavement keyed into the American lexicon and the ways that history permeates our cultural boundaries today.