![]() That field is now usually called Black Studies.Īlmost 35 years later, there is perhaps only one single sentence in Spillers’s 20 dense pages that doesn’t hold up - a transitional aside where she observes, “The conditions of ‘Middle Passage’ are among the most incredible narratives available to the student, as it remains not easily imaginable.” Meanwhile, the reason this sentence may not hold up owes to the publication, later in 1987, of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s extraordinary historical novel. The essay traced the boundary of what became an entire field of study situated in the overlap of critical theory, African and African American studies, feminist inquiry, textual analysis, and archival research. ![]() Spillers’s essay, its evidence, its argument, and its extraordinarily generativity defies easy summary - despite, or perhaps due to, a citation count well into the thousands. Spillers titled “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Marshalling its author’s considerable interdisciplinary chops, the essay drew a line between the racist laws applied to Black families under chattel slavery and the racist assumptions brought to bear on Black families in the postwar United States. IN THE SUMMER of 1987, the academic journal Diacritics published an essay by Hortense J. ![]()
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