Black, White, and in Color : Essays on American Literature and Culture

Rating:
Summary: Courageous book by a towering intellectual.
Review: The publication of Prof. Spillers' book hopefully signals a more widespread dissemination of her extraordinary intellectual and imaginative work. Bringing together some very familiar (and endlessly cited) essays, such as "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe...", as well as essays from more obscure locations, and unpublished work, 'Black, White, and in Color...' illuminates Prof. Spillers' resolutely unorthodox and powerful thinking around the racialization and gendering of the brutal history of the United States, from the genocide of American Indians to the enslavement of Africans in the "New World". She brings a vast historical knowledge to bear on her brilliantly idiosyncratic literary critical enterprise. The ways in which she intertwines feminisms, psychoanalysis, and literature, and then proceeds to re-weave them, stuns. Edmund Burke is an influence, and she turns the latter, canonical critic's ideas upside down such that Burke and William Faulkner can never be seen the same way again. Though finding occasional recourse to post-structuralism, Spillers is, in no way, an acolyte of Derrida and his followers. This is an indispensable book which, had it not appeared, would have to be written. It follows Marx's injunction to carry out "a ruthless critique of all that exists".