Liane Hypolite:
Hello, everyone. Welcome. And thank you for joining us today. My name is Liane Hypolite, and I'm an assistant professor of educational leadership at Cal Poly Pomona. I'm also a proud Class of 2010 Brandeis graduate. And I serve as the co-chair of the Alumni Of Color Network for our Brandeis organization, as well as a member of our Alumni Association, board of directors. And it is my ultimate honor privilege, a pleasure to welcome you to today's program on behalf of the Alumni Association, featuring Hortense Spillers, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. And Shoniqua Roach, Assistant Professor of African and African-American studies, and women's gender and sexuality studies. This program is co-sponsored by the African and African-American studies department at Brandeis, as well as the Alumni Of Color Network. We are delighted to welcome you, our alumni, parents, Brandeis national committee members, and friends around the world. Thank you so much for joining us.
Liane Hypolite:
So I want to take a moment to introduce our speakers for today. I'll start with Dr. Hortense Spillers, an American literary critic, black feminist scholar, and the Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Her essays on African-American literature in black, white, and in color essays on American literature and culture, published by the University of Chicago press in 2003, are foundational. After earning her PhD from Brandeis in 1974, she taught at Wellesley College, Haverford College, Cornell University, Emory University, and Vanderbilt University. Professor Spiller's research addresses psycho analysis in race, the African diaspora, African-American literature and criticism, the representation of race in literature, linguistics, black culture, and sexuality. She's best known for her 1987 article, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe an American grammar book. One of the most cited essays in African-American literacy studies today. She is co-founder of the Feminist Wire, an online magazine dedicated to feminist issues and critique.
Liane Hypolite:
Currently she is working on two new projects concerning the idea of black culture and black women, as well as the early state formation. Professor Spillers has received numerous awards and fellowships during her career. Just this April, she was elected to the prestigious American Academy of the Arts and Sciences and recipient of the Brandeis University Alumni Achievement Award in 2019. Brandeis provost emeritus, Lisa Lynch describes Spillers as quote, "Pioneering professor, feminist scholar and critic, whose contributions have influenced the landscape of African-American literary studies, and advanced the black feminist theory." We're so happy to have you.
Liane Hypolite:
Next, our also esteemed speaker, Dr. Shoniqua Roach is an assistant professor of African and African-American studies and women's gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis University. Her peer reviewed work has appeared and is forthcoming in many scholarly journals and publications, such as feminist theory, the black scholar science, journal of women in culture and society differences, a journal of feminist cultural studies, feminist formations, and many other publication outlets. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Lack Dwelling, homemaking, and erotic Freedom, an intellectual and cultural history of the ways in which black homes have been tragic sites of state invasion, as well as paradigmatic entry points for black women artists, activists, and intellectuals to imagine, rehearse and enact black erotic freedom. Her research has been supported by an American council of learned societies, ACLS fellowship, and the Ford Foundation postdoctoral fellowship. She sits on the editorial board of Signs, a journal of women in culture and society. Welcome professors Spillers and Roach. And I look forward to your discussion today.
Shoniqua Roach:
Thank you so much, Liane. So I'm going to lean right in with questions. Professor Spillers, you are Brandeis Alum, we are so fortunate to have you here and as a continued member of the Brandeis community, could you tell us a bit about your time at Brandeis?
Hortense Spillers:
Well, thank you very much Shoniqua. And I want to thank Leanna for that wonderful introduction. And for Alison and the alumni community for getting us together for this interlocution. It's a great pleasure to be here. So you've called upon me to take myself back 50 years ago. Well, 50 years ago and counting. What Brandeis was like in 1968 is probably not imaginable from this vantage because so much has changed at Brandeis since those days. When I was there a couple of years ago, I didn't even recognize the campus. When I was there, it seems to me that there was one way in and one way out, whereas today it's a very different scene. The one thing that I constantly remember though, about that particular year and the year that followed is that, Brandeis in the context of 1968 was a very dynamic campus.
Hortense Spillers:
It was full of radical transformation because there were two or three movements or currents of movements running through the university at that time. Not only were there many more black students that year at Brandeis, but then Brandeis was also the site of student movement by way of the Vietnam war protest. But 1968 was also the year that Brandeis installed its transitional year program, which brought a large number of black undergraduates to campus. My first job as a graduate student at Brandeis was working for that program. I was a young teacher in the transitional year program that was designed to help students, well, do exactly what the program said, make the transition to the freshman year at Brandeis. So courses were offered in writing for instance, to prepare our students for the first year. There were also, I think that year, an infusion of more black graduate with students. It was not a large number, but I think there were more students that year in the graduate school, black students in English, anthropology, sociology, at the Heller school, than there had been before.
Hortense Spillers:
And so it was in effect, what might have been something of a new university, in that the realities on the ground were so transformative and so different. And sure enough, that year, that academic year, '68, '69 saw the creation of black studies at Brandeis with the takeover of Ford Hall, which at the time was the communications center at the university. And that followed the winter of 1969. And with that takeover, one of the demands was the creation of a black studies program. And sure enough, what came out of that 10 day movement was the creation of black studies, which might've been one of the first black studies programs on predominantly white campuses in the United States. And so it was in that context that my work for the PhD proceeded. And with that, I would say that it met disruption.
Hortense Spillers:
There were a lot of days when it was hard to get to class because so much was happening outside the classroom that we could, well, I guess you could say extra curricular activity that year with demonstrations all over the campus, that outside the classroom was as much a classroom as the classroom itself. I will always think of it that way, that I was certainly learning as much outside the classroom as I was inside it. Or I guess you could say the inside the classroom was being extended to the outside. That started happening in the reverse with the coming about of black studies. But those were the days when inner and outer converged on a single stage. So it was an exciting time to be there.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. So you didn't train in black studies, you trained in English?
Hortense Spillers:
I trained in English, that's right. In English and American literature.
Shoniqua Roach:
American lit. And there you wrote a dissertation.
Hortense Spillers:
Yes.
Shoniqua Roach:
The conversation will soon be published with Duke University press.
Hortense Spillers:
That's right.
Shoniqua Roach:
I'm going to get the book immediately, but could you tell us a bit about that dissertation work, now book project, and your intellectual journey, post Brandeis?
Hortense Spillers:
That work really grows out of my biography, my own human and social history. I grew up in the Southern black Baptist church in Memphis, Tennessee. And of course at the time that I was growing up, I had no idea that the rituals that I was observing along with my family had such critical cultural gravity or meaning. I really was not aware of that until the King movement. Even though I grew up in the church where there was great preaching and speaking and singing and music, I observed it as a child would observe these things. And what that means is, okay you go because your parents make you go, not because you're particularly interested, but because they see to it that you are there. And so you are absorbing these things, not aware quite yet of what they mean.
Hortense Spillers:
But once we reached the 50s and heightened consciousness or growing consciousness about the meaning of things, I eventually came to understand that these sermons that I was listening to in my church and other churches in the city of Memphis had grave cultural important because I saw them used in a way that was transformative in terms of what was happening politically with black life in the United States. And so once I saw what King was doing with the sermon, and he wasn't preaching sermons, he was making speeches, but it really was the very same thing in terms of technique, in terms of the mobilization of language in order to be persuasive, in order to move people, in order to get things done. I saw King make use of those techniques that I was aware of as a child, but now became aware of in a very different way.
Hortense Spillers:
So once I got to Brandeis, I was not quite aware that I was going to study sermons because I came really to the graduate program with an interest in William Blake's prophetic books and the English romantic writers. But then once the black studies movement was underway in that crucial year '68, '69, and I can't say exactly how it dawned on me that most immediately I had another kind of, let's call it a hermeneutic demand, or there was now a necessity to understand something else in detail. And that was the idea of black culture or to take hold of black culture or black history, which I was being exposed to really all the time without really knowing that that was going on, but to come into awareness of it in a systematic way. And that's really where the study of black sermons came from.
Hortense Spillers:
It really started with my study of Martin Luther King's pulpit style. I saw Martin Luther King persuade thousands of people really to risk their life by putting their body on the line in order to change things. And it became an entire movement. And I was fascinated by he could do that with language. And it was a language that I knew very well from all those years of a cultural apprenticeship in the church. And so that's when I set out to write a dissertation at a university founded by a Jewish community under the direction of professor Alan Grossman, who didn't know anything about black sermons, but he was very curious and open to find out. And so we set about looking for a way to do this dissertation, which was completed over a couple of years in the spring of 1974.
Shoniqua Roach:
That's amazing. That's amazing. So I've asked you this question in another context, how did you make sense of the gender politics of some of the black males, somewhat argued charismatic leaders that you were looking at in the dissertation such as Martin Luther King, Jr? And how did you broker that transition from writing about sermons to writing some of the most field defining articles in black feminist thought by the 1980s?
Hortense Spillers:
Well, it was an evolution that sort of worked this way. Once I was at Wellesley, I was a joint appointment in English and black studies from 1974 to the late 70s when I left Wellesley and headed to the Midwest and the University of Nebraska, and then back to Haverford and so forth. But somewhere in there after I left Wellesley, the women's movement sprang up and part, in response to radical movement on, what I would call or what I think we would all call, the American lift at that moment. So that race studies and gender studies really came together in those years to produce women studies and black studies that were, for my generation anyway, simultaneous movements. It's difficult to think of those movements as separate because they were, interconnected. Even though black studies came a little bit before and might have inspired gender studies in terms of their impact on the curriculum in the humanities academy, in any case, that impact was really a confluence or a convergent movement.
Hortense Spillers:
So that by the time we reached the 80s, black studies and women's studies were full fledged, full throated movements in their own way. And it was pretty clear to many of us that even though we belonged as black women to black movement and women's movement, what our experiences were, were not represented necessarily in a full and varied and rich enough way in either one of those movements. So what becomes black women's studies or an emphasis on the life and thinking of black women, really grows out of that moment when we realized that black women in relationship to both of those movements was really interstitial. It fell between the cracks and so one of the germinal texts of those years, all the blacks are men, all the women are white, but some of us are brave, names very precisely what the situation of black women was by the early 1980s.
Hortense Spillers:
And so those essays, Interstices, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, Neither Nor, the one on The Permanent Obliquity Of An Infallibly Straight, A Look At Daughters And Fathers. Those essays grew directly out of a need to create the stage for an interlocution between feminists across the racial and cultural divide.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
Because black women's life was not an afterthought., it was something that some of us were living very directly every day.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
And so in the effort to respond to that, we had to put what was not there, so that the idea of black woman at the podium would not any longer be a novel idea or an afterthought or a second thought, but that it would become a part of the conversation. In other words, you couldn't even constitute the conversation without this particular component in it. And so that's where a lot of that work comes from, it comes out of the need to help bring about an interlocution between facets of feminist thought in the United States in the late 70s, early 80s.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
Yeah?
Shoniqua Roach:
No, I was going to say those articles do so much work to destabilize and set about the reconstruction of the category, black woman, as a political signifier. I don't know that anyone who's read Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe will ever forget the opening lines, "I'm a marked woman, but not everyone knows my name." So you speak a bit about the social political economic conditions that shaped that work in the 1980s. I'm also curious about how you would define the category of black woman now?
Hortense Spillers:
I've thought about that questions Shoniqua, what I would say about that category now, and the answer is a little complicated, but I would start it this way. I think it's not always easy for us to keep in mind that when we say black woman, we actually mean at least two different things. One of the things we mean is black women as a historical and empirical reality. That would mean millions of human beings on the face of the globe in innumerable circumstances, in an infinity of circumstances that can never be accounted for in one breath.
Hortense Spillers:
Because we are talking about the span of generations. We're talking across cultures, languages, geographies, and political circumstance, politics, historical formation, educational configurations. I mean, we're talking about the African diaspora in its widest possible circumstance from Russia to Scandinavia, to the New World, the Caribbean, Canada, the United States, Europe, all of that.
Hortense Spillers:
Those millions of human beings that you can never capture and account for on paper, that you can never adequately theorize about because they exceed theory in their life forms. So that's one thing, the empirical and the living circumstance of black women.
Hortense Spillers:
Then there is black woman as a critical category, that defines a theoretical subject position, that you can try and get a hold of theoretically on paper. That particular category of black woman is concocted both in the academy and outside the academy. I mean, for instance, you and I would have such a category. It would probably differ a little bit generationally, but we would have such a category that we would talk about along several lines of stress.
Hortense Spillers:
Perhaps intersectional criticism might be one of them. Then there is another such category that runs concurrent with or asymptomatic to what we would create. I would call that black woman as a category of public relations. Category of public relations is the place where mythology takes shape, where idols, I-D-O-L-S and I-D-Y-L-L-S, where those things form. That's the place that you can't control.
Hortense Spillers:
I would say it's at that place that might not differ so much from what it was 20 years ago or 20 years before that. Because the public relations angle is, who do people say we are? Not only what do we say are, but who do others say we are? That's a huge subject. In some ways it has a positive valence and a negative valence. It simply depends on who you're talking to, where those, or how those trendlines would point.
Hortense Spillers:
On the positive scale, I would look at the situation like this. The black woman today is coming into her own as a cluster of images in her positionality in the world at large, as an academic, as a public intellectual, scientist, jurist, doctor, you name it. The black woman today occupies positions that she was not occupying when I entered the academy in 1974, when I entered the academy 50 years ago.
Hortense Spillers:
So that's one set of circumstance. The vice president of the United States is a black woman. One of the wealthiest people in the world is a black woman. They are black women CEOs all over the place. If you look at American television today, especially the cable outlets, they're black people, black women, or the image of the black woman in nearly every frame. So in the world of the every day, black women now do one of the cultural subjects do.
Hortense Spillers:
I can't think now of any cultural practice or cultural formation where the image of black women or the imprint of the black woman is absent. So that contends with the negative valence. The black woman who is an object of police violence, domestic violence, underpay, under employment. So those two trend lines, one of them pointing up, the other one pointing down are always lines that are running concurrently.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
Right? So that's what I would say the difference is now. That the trend line that is pointing upward right is a lot richer, more varied, more multiple, more diverse than it was 50 years ago at the same time that we are still threatened by those forces that point downward.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
The trend line that point downward.
Shoniqua Roach:
I'm happy that you raised this. As you were talking about black women in greater positions of visibility, if you will, I want to ask you what your thoughts were on the utility of that representation? Some might argue hyper visibility, because as you say, as you note, that sits coterminously with downward trending conditions for poor black women all over the globe.
Shoniqua Roach:
There's a recent report that was published by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Institute for Women's Policy Research, it's called the Status of Black Women Report. Alicia Garza also had a hand in it. So they say that they want to evaluate for the very first time and have black women at the center of evaluating data around what's going on with black women in the United States.
Shoniqua Roach:
They raised some compelling statistics. So black women make up about 6.5% of the US population, have the highest labor force participation, yet on the median collect about $35,000 a year, are facing crises of houselessness, domestic violence, etc, etc. So how do we see these things, intention, how do we balance them, and what is the black feminist project now, given those contradictory realities?
Hortense Spillers:
That's a tough one and a complex one that has shadowed and haunted the history of black women in the context of the United States for ever. If you go back for instance, and look at that wonderful Schomburg collection, black women of the 19th century, the Schomburg library. If you go back and look at Annie Julia Cooper's Voices from the South, you will be struck by the contemporaneity of her thinking.
Hortense Spillers:
In other words, when I re-read aspects of the work of family recently, it was just amazing to me how contemporaneous her remarks were in the sense that it's like, you're looking at a stage in a stigmatic way. You get a stigmatism looking at it. In other words, here is Anna Julia Cooper, who's privileged as a woman, as a black woman, as an American, who was doing very well. I think a PhD in French from the Sorbonne. She's doing great.
Hortense Spillers:
This is the world at the turn of the century, who is writing about black women who were doing much less well than herself. She's trying to write it. She's trying to write that contradiction by situating herself afforded. In other words, here's Anna Julia Cooper, trying to walk in the shoes of women that Booker T Washington was talking to when he and Dubois were arguing about what sort of protocol one needed to adopt in relationship to Friedman in the United States.
Hortense Spillers:
So she's trying to write it. She's trying to figure out a way to say at the same time, there was a class difference between myself and some other black women, but the class difference cannot permanently separate us, or the class difference must be mounted or it, we have to ride the tension. I think that's the situation that we find ourselves in today. That we are on the one hand celebrating, at the same time that we are in a state of fear, anxiety, constant anxiety, about what could happen if you walk outside your door.
Hortense Spillers:
I mean, we tend to forget that Ms. Sandra bland was leaving the campus, if I am not mistaken of Prairie View College. This was a young woman who was about to become, I think, a young professor at Prairie View, when she was stopped by the police. That was the last time that any of us ever saw her alive again. That could happen to any one of us, that situation right there.
Hortense Spillers:
So you get the confluence of this class problematic that I'm talking about. Sandra Glenn for all intents and purposes is not policed bait. This is somebody who is not going to disobey the law. This is somebody who is not on welfare, who does not need anything from the state. She doesn't need any of that. This is somebody who is smart, clever, industrious, successful. I mean, all those things you want to name. She's got that going for her at the same time that she is vulnerable to some hysterical human being who decides to stop her because her blinker isn't working or whatever the arbitrary reason is who stops her.
Hortense Spillers:
Because she does not get on her knees and fall down and do obeisance, this person puts her under a arrest because he can do that. Now, that kind of stomach turning sickening reality is what we've still got. The United States in the year 2021. 50 years have not changed that at all. At the same time that it's given us more Sandra Bland's in the world, it has given us a black woman who at one time was the chief magistrate of the international criminal court at The Hague.
Hortense Spillers:
It's given us black woman ambassadors. I mean, you name it, we've got it. I mean, the black women doctors on this vaccine that's saving lives, you've gotten more of that in any one of those women. That includes me and you today can leave our house today. If we are not careful, or if somebody gets hysterical behind a badge or a gun or a taser or a laser, or you name it, our lives can end in a snap.
Hortense Spillers:
Well, that is extraordinarily upsetting at the same time that it creates the tension that makes us celebratory. It seems to me that we're caught in the binary. We cannot leave that situation yet because we are still subjects who were coming fully into our own, whatever that's going to mean, that's still evolving.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
So that's the celebratory stage that we're in at the same time that as Michelle Obama said, just a couple of days ago, at the same time, you're celebrating, you're concerned about the life of your children, the children of your neighbors, and what could happen to them and how your children getting something as simple as a driver's license makes you crazy.
Hortense Spillers:
So who else has that in the United States? I know no other community in the life and thought of the United States that is living that kind of a stigmatism or that kind of necessity to be touched on the pulse of the nerve by the situation that you live every day. I think that is the thing that gives black personality, it's heightened conscience or consciousness, however you want to call that. I think that's the reason why, because we're always balancing that situation that is split between life possibility and vulnerability, danger, precarity.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. So black feminists have productively written about the complicated realities, that structure, various institutions, carceral, and state institutions, the university, the church, and so on and so forth. What is the relationship between a black feminist division of justice and what's been more recently embraced as a politics of abolition?
Hortense Spillers:
I sort of think those two ideas might be synonymous or interrelated or overlapping. I guess I would say that black feminist, or I would say the Black Feminist Project from everything I understand about it and the history of it, is always projected a politics of abolition. It hasn't always called it there. It's called it the insurgent ground. It's talked about revolutionary possibility. It's talked about radical transformation. It's talked about civil disobedience.
Hortense Spillers:
It's called the abolitionist possibility a number of things. But I think a politics of abolition and the Black Feminist Project would have some of the same aims, maybe some of the same ways to get there. So then from that point of view they would be related.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. So in your 2006, New Centennial Review article, which you mentioned at the top of the conversation, the idea of black culture, you work rigorously so rigorously within a critical theoretical tradition to arrive at an understanding of culture that is distinctly, I'm going to bracket, anti-black. Forgive the oversimplification here, but you come to the conclusion that any idea of culture, American culture, Western culture, legal culture, social justice culture is rooted in black exploitation and exclusion, or to borrow a formulation from Kiana Yamada Taylor, a kind of predatory inclusion.
Shoniqua Roach:
I see that in connection with how you're thinking through the visibility of black women, middle class and elite black women within the public sector. So we're arguably in a cultural moment where it's become completely culturally appropriate to either denounce black life as part of one's personal political cultural project or subjectivity, or to claim an affinity for black life as part of one's political subjectivity.
Shoniqua Roach:
So I'm thinking of Black Lives Matter. So how do you view these twin cultural impulses? Are these impulses two sides of the same anti-black coin? How do you imagine a way forward and where does spirit or spirituality fit in? Because at the end of that article, the idea of black culture, you say that a dose of the incredible spirit world is necessary to bring about the repair of the psychic damage of slavery and serves as an antidote to the believers status of black women in contemporary America. So what did you mean here?
Hortense Spillers:
I don't, I don't recognize the quote. I'm going to go back and get that article because I was thinking, "Now, is that my quote or was that someone paraphrasing what I was saying." In that article that you're referencing in the Centennial review, what I was trying to get at was the extent to which black culture gives its name to all culture.
Hortense Spillers:
In other words, what I'm really getting at there, is that if you trace it out, if you track it out, black culture in its radicality, in the kinds of questions that it is raising about human possibility, in its resistance to the antisocial and the inhuman, is itself the work of culture.
Hortense Spillers:
So to give it that name would mean that there's culture apart from it and what I'm trying to do is dismantle that idea, so that what I'm really saying is that perhaps the only culture is really Black culture.
Hortense Spillers:
Right? That's where the article is trying to go. It's a bigger subject that I really am trying to work out in the project called, The Idea of Black Culture, and so that's what I'm trying to argue. I would say that as I see it, the way we formulate this question gives everybody a reprieve from consequences,
Shoniqua Roach:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Hortense Spillers:
So that the only people who bear consequences or must pay the piper or must bear consequences are Black people, and so what I am suggesting is that if you keep pushing the contradictions far enough, you get a kind of torque movement in the culture so that you involve more and more life of the nation in the questions that you're asking, so that eventually Black people are not the only people who are accountable. Everybody is eventually accountable for what happens in the democracy. That it is not just the work of Black people or Black lives matter, it's not just the work of those communities to save the culture.
Shoniqua Roach:
Right.
Hortense Spillers:
So much of white life acts as if all the things that are happening out in the street don't have anything to do with me. Police brutality, or what happened at the Capitol on the 6th of January, or the insane recounting of the vote in Arizona. I don't understand why the nation, why the United States, is not outraged by what is happening with this counting the votes again. Who are these people in Arizona? Are they children? And why are we tolerating this? You mean to tell me, there's nobody who can stop this? I've never seen anything like this in my life.
Hortense Spillers:
What happened at the United States Capitol on the 6th of January is a shame before God. It's incredible to me that we suffer this daily. So what is it about life in the United States that only particular groups of people bear the burden of the historical, so that it seems to me the anti-Blackness is denying the burden of history in relationship to yourself.
Shoniqua Roach:
Right. Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
So that when the country comes into its own, it acknowledges what its own history is and it seems to me that it's in that acknowledgement, that the work of culture becomes the work of everybody in the culture, but that work will have been led by Black community of necessity, because it understands something about danger and dying, because it has had to withstand so much of it. So, that's what that article was really getting at and that's where I come out today, that what I would like to see, is that the society to come into an understanding of what critical culture is and so for me, Black culture is critical culture. Political culture is Black culture and that is the ultimate goal, as I see it, of what culture was supposed to do. That's what leads us to, I think, the kind of humane living that we all want.
Hortense Spillers:
We should not have to fear leaving our house every day because of police brutality or because my neighbor is going to lose her mind or his mind and shoot the first nine people that they see that walk out their door. What is that about? That's not just a Black problem. That's a critical social problem that we are not solving because we don't think that as a society, it has anything to do with us, but it does and I think that's what Black culture has been screaming all these years, that this is about you also, it's not just about me and my status. Right? So, that's where I see that.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. What does that look like? This is a really frank, candid question in everyday political practice, I just, I see Blackness, Black culture being claimed in such fungible ways, even, and especially in the context of Black lives matter, which is part of where my question stems. So what is a humane way, a Black feminist way of taking up culture as Black culture, as critical culture? Have you seen an everyday manifestation of that?
Hortense Spillers:
How it would work as... Yeah. Yeah. I would say this, I live in now, this is a very small example. It might even be a petty one, but I take heart in an example like this. In my neighborhood in Nashville and I live in east Nashville, which is the other side of the Cumberland river and this side of Nashville gets a lot of storms, right? It's also that part of Nashville that is not official Nashville. It might be a little more mixed, a little more varied racially, and then what people do for a living. So there are all kinds of people in my neighborhood. I can now think of three different places in my neighborhood, three or four different places in my neighborhood where Black lives matter signs are propped up and they don't get damaged.
Hortense Spillers:
I also remember that I saw Biden Harris signs in my neighborhood last year, just as I saw Obama Biden signs in previous years. What does that mean? I think that means that there is a level of consciousness, at least on this side of town, that would suggest to me that somebody who may or may not be Black people, but that some people who are anonymous to me, are taking up issues that are important to me and that are important to a collective. That would be an example of it. People participating in Black movement across the country who may or may not be Black people would be an example, I think, from the everyday world that would show that it can happen and it happens gradually and slowly, and it happens all the time and it's good to see.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
Yeah.
Shoniqua Roach:
Thank you for sharing that example.
Hortense Spillers:
Yeah.
Shoniqua Roach:
And for your brilliance as ever. I think we have turn it over to questions from the audience now, Prof. Spillers, I'm happy to read them aloud.
Hortense Spillers:
Okay.
Shoniqua Roach:
So going to go to Napoleon's question, role and responsibility of Black men.
Hortense Spillers:
Yeah. The role and responsibility of Black men, as I see it, it doesn't really shift. I think with Black men, the responsibility is what it's always been and I think it is a burden that Black men are often called upon to bear and many of them bear it quite, quite courageously. Right? And that is to work alongside Black women democratically to bring about a better synthesis, a stronger democratic synthesis and as I say in the Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe piece, I think Black men are poised to understand something that other men are not necessarily going to understand so well because they think they have been excused from history or from the burden of history.
Hortense Spillers:
I think Black men very often understand that burden, and can sympathize with the feminine that they bear within themselves and I think that's the power of Black men. I'm not saying that happens in every case. We know certainly enough Black men who simply repeat what the culture would have the male repeat and that is a kind of backward movement. We've certainly seen enough of that, but forward thinking Black men, I think, understand very well how their role and the role of others are really complimentary.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
Yeah.
Shoniqua Roach:
Thank you. I have a question from Jolisa, which I'm going to paraphrase if that's okay. So is it possible to acquire democracy within the nation state built on anti-Black violence as you so carefully outlined in Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe?
Hortense Spillers:
No. I don't think that on anti-Black violence... No, I don't think it's possible to build anything on anti-Black violence. I think anti-Black violence, as we see, is destroying this culture. It can certainly not build a new one or a revised and corrected one because anti-Black violence so far as I am concerned, is anti-human and does not recognize itself as an anti-human form, or does not recognize itself as a human response. It has not come into its humanity. In other words, what I'm saying, in order for somebody to put his foot on my neck for nine minutes, means that not only is that person killing me, but something is wrong with the person who's doing that. That's not a human being who's doing that. That's another state of being, so far as I'm concerned. That's another human condition, that person hasn't come into human form yet and so that whole anti-Blackness tips, as far as I am concerned. Wherever it is installed, I don't think installs a culture. I think it's anti-culture or dysfunctional, or anti-human. It's anti-human movement, as I see it.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. I have a question from Larissa who says, thank you so much, it's been a pleasure and a privilege to tune into this talk. Larissa has begun to think of Black feminist thought or the Black feminist project, or Larissa's thinking that the Black feminist project makes feminist thought at large, relevant. Is this fair to say? Is this the correct understanding of the dynamic?
Hortense Spillers:
That Black feminist thought,
Shoniqua Roach:
Makes feminist thought at large relevant? Is that fair to say, Larissa asks.
Hortense Spillers:
I think at some point, Black feminist thought and feminist thought merge in this sense. I don't think you can really carry out feminist thought in some kind of neutral way. Right? In other words, there is Grey's Anatomy, but then there is my body as the human being. Right?
Shoniqua Roach:
Right.
Hortense Spillers:
And so that, I would say that that is analogous to a feminist thought, that we can think about feminist thought as some kind of categorical entity or punctuality. But when you inhabit it, it always becomes a particular thing. It is always vested with particularity of situation, moment, name, place, circumstance, so that there is feminist thought, but then there is only feminist thought as it is carried out by particular subjects. Right? Or particular instances, and yeah, that's the way I would answer that.
Shoniqua Roach:
I love that. It sounds like it runs parallel to your ideas of culture and the idea of Black culture.
Hortense Spillers:
Right.
Shoniqua Roach:
Viewing feminist thought, unless it bears a material and substantive relationship to Black feminist thought.
Hortense Spillers:
Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah.
Shoniqua Roach:
No, go.
Hortense Spillers:
No, I was just thinking if it's in the head of a particular person, then it takes on the coloration, I guess, pun intended. It takes on the coloration and circumstance of that situation specificity.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So Emily Rose says that it would be an honor to hear Professor Spiller's thoughts on the current situation in Palestine and the effects of imperialism on the Black lives matter movement.
Hortense Spillers:
The situation of Palestine is still unfolding today and I would like for someone to address that. I don't understand what's what's going on there, right, in this conflict between the Palestinian people and the Israeli people. If there's anybody in the audience who can raise a hand to address that situation, I would be glad to listen and imperialism, we always have with us, in the sense that there are power asymmetries and it may be within the Palestinian Israeli situation we're looking at asymmetrical power, right? That we're looking at one side is more powerful than another side. In that case, what's the obligation of the empowered, in relationship to the less powerful?
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
As I see it, that is the situation in the Middle East now and perhaps that defines what that situation has been all along.
Shoniqua Roach:
Right.
Hortense Spillers:
How do you address those asymmetries of power and what was the other part of that question in relationship to the-
Shoniqua Roach:
Black lives matter movement.
Hortense Spillers:
In relationship to the Imperial or the-
Shoniqua Roach:
Imperialism. Yeah.
Hortense Spillers:
Yeah. Imperialism. In so far as, police power is the state speaking, I guess you could say that, that would within itself, identify another one of those asymmetrical power instances. A police officer with a no-knock warrant and a gun on one hip and a taser on the other, has power over whoever it is he or she is confronting at the moment. Would you call that imperialistic reflex? I don't know. I don't know what you would call it. We usually think of the empirical though, in relationship to large entities confronting one another and large entities in confrontation, in an asymmetrical way that gives one more power than another. I don't know if you would say that, that's applicable to the situation that Black lives matter is drawing attention to or not. It may be applicable. I wouldn't immediately think that though. If I were just thinking off the cuff, I would say that they are a little different, that Black lives matter would be more immediate and circumstantial, closer to the bone than the empirical, which I would see somewhat at a distance and perhaps involving institutional formation more directly then Black lives matter is dealing with.
Shoniqua Roach:
Right. Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
Yeah.
Shoniqua Roach:
Karen Hodges self identifies as a white woman who was a grad student at Brandeis in the sixties. Karen is now only beginning to learn what Karen has needed to know all along, about the dark side of American culture. How can Black studies be more thoroughly integrated into the canon of what any well-educated person is supposed to know?
Hortense Spillers:
One way that it can be integrated more thoroughly, I suppose you could say that it is to do more of what we're doing now, except that there is so much resistance to it. This is the example of what, I mean, the 1619 project, for example. In the 1619 project has gotten such backlash that it's ridiculous. Why is it that we are being called upon to choose between 1619, and 1776?
Shoniqua Roach:
Right.
Hortense Spillers:
They belong to the same sequence of movements that put the United States in motion. 1619 is the year of Europeans arriving on these shores, as well as Africans arriving on these shores where Indigenous people already were.
Hortense Spillers:
You can yell and scream and resist all day long, you can't change that fact. So the problem we're having is that there is a resistance to history by what is called the right wing in the United States, and that is people who are not only ignorant of history, but disdainful of it and resistant to it. And so when I am suggesting is that we've got to find ways to break through the disdainful, proud, resistant, ignorance to what American history is. And American history, if you think about it, begins long before 1619. I mean, if you want to choose some other year, you could say 1492. That's another kind of year, or you could say the mid 15th century when the transatlantic slave trade begins in Lisbon.
Hortense Spillers:
I mean, there are many years that one can start talking about movement that eventually lands European settlers and African captives on the shores of the United States that belongs to the larger Americas, which is the larger new world complex that includes North and South America and the Caribbean. You have to talk about all of that.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely.
Hortense Spillers:
And to resist it really makes me sick. And so we've got to find a way to stop people from resisting with, oh I don't know dumb concepts like cancel culture, woke culture. I mean, all these ugly words in terms that don't mean anything because people want to stay asleep or they want to stay infants. They want to stay little children rather than grow up and confront what we need to confront as grown people. And we have to confront living as adults that includes confronting what the United States is, which was not created overnight, or out of thin air, or out of a vacuum. I mean, it came out of the world as it existed all those centuries before it became a democratic Republic in 1789. Got to breakthrough. Got to breakthrough.
Shoniqua Roach:
That work needs to happen in everyday life. Very everyday fine-grain life. Just as a quotidian example, my kiddo came home the other day and said that she was learning about the Revolutionary War, so she's parsing all of these definitions, the Federalists, the loyalists, et cetera. And I wrote to her teacher immediately and said, "Do you realize that you're teaching the history of indigenous genocide? Anti-black exclusion? Are we talking about these things from the perspectives of black and indigenous people? If not, why are you teaching my child this history in the age of black lives matter?" If there's going to be time for an intervention to do something else with knowledge production, it's now. It's now.
Hortense Spillers:
There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the need to talk about our history as holistically and accurately as we can is such a necessity, right? We are not meeting it. I mean, there are these binary oppositions that simply don't work. I mean, you can't do 1619 if you're going to do 1776 or 1789. If you're going to do 1789, you can't do 1619. How dumb is that? Right? I mean, those things belong to the same fabric, or the same human stage, so you really can't do one without doing the other. I mean, without 1619, there is no 1789 or 1776. And without 1776, 1789, 1619, there is no Civil War, and on and on and on. And without indigenous communities being destroyed, there is no real estate that makes way for settlers who settle the United States. I mean, it's all a part of the same picture. Yeah.
Shoniqua Roach:
Thank you. So I have a number of questions. We won't get to all of them. I'm going to group and synthesize a bit. So from Carmel Omen, Hey Carmel, can I ask if there's a particular book or text you're sitting with these days? I'm going to group that with Ariel, tuning in from Chicago, can you talk more about the pedagogical approaches you use to bring black feminisms to life for your students? One more, and you can count on me to synthesize, from an anonymous attendee, Prof. Spillers, thinking about your formation as a literary scholar, and your thinking about black culture as critical culture, are there any 21st century literary works that you recommend for the critique they offer of our contemporary circumstances? So, I hear these questions asking what are some texts that we could be reading now.
Hortense Spillers:
Oh my goodness. There's so many. There's so many of them that we could be reading now. I'll just say a few things at random. I have been thinking about in a systematic way black thought formation. When we say the idea of black culture, when we say black studies, what are we talking about? And I'm trying to do that in a systematic way. Some of the thinkers that I am looking at in connection with that question include Denise da Silva's work on... And I'm not going to get the title right. You can correct me here Shoniqua on the title of her book on race. Is it Race Theory? Oh, I need to look that up.
Shoniqua Roach:
Toward a Global Idea of Race.
Hortense Spillers:
Toward a Global Idea of Race. That would be one. Barbara and Karen Fields, Race Craft. And I would just add that Barbara Fields is a Brandeisian who was in graduate school at the same time that I was in graduate school. Barbara was in sociology at the same time that I was in English. Her sister is a historian and they put together Race Craft. I would include that one. I would include Nahum Chandler's X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. Alex Weheliye's Habeas Viscus. I would include that. And any number of works by black feminists now. Your work Shoniqua would be in that. Rebecca Threadcraft's work. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman. Christina Sharpe.
Shoniqua Roach:
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson.
Hortense Spillers:
Okay. Yeah, I would say all of those would work for starters, right? Yeah.
Shoniqua Roach:
Thank you. So what are some of the... This is from an anonymous attendee. What are some of the under emphasized questions of black feminism that you would like to see younger black women, I'll extend that out to black feminists, intellectual activists, pursue. In other words, what do we need to know and why?
Hortense Spillers:
I would love to see us extend our psychoanalytic probe. I would love to see more work on traumas associated with the historical progression of African diasporic subjects. I think we have not done quite enough of that work yet. We're beginning to do more of it, but I would like to see even more of it. I mean, for instance, one of the questions that I have, and it's a big subject, is the extent to which the Oedipus complex, and the Fanonians would say there is no Oedipus complex among black folk. That's what Fanon says in Black Skin, White Masks. I think he's wrong, but I like to see that subject pursued because some scholars do think there is such a thing as African Oedipus. In the event that there is an African Oedipus, I would like to know how we would read that today in the diaspora.
Hortense Spillers:
And if the Oedipus complex is what I think it is, and that is children coming into their own, or children becoming authority figures, children being given permission by their elders to become authority figures, or the torch being passed from one generation to the next, or the baton being passed from one generation to the next. I think that's what it is. I would say that's what the Oedipus complex is and that happens in all cultures all the time and always has across the generations, whether we call it the Oedipus complex or not. That transfer of power takes place. If that was interrupted by middle passage, in the case of African personality, what difference does that make to life today in the diaspora? That's the question that I am posing to myself and I welcome anybody who would like to help out answering that question, because I think it would take us far in understanding horizontal or intramural relations.
Hortense Spillers:
In other words, if I understand what my vertical relationship is, that is my relationship to my ancestors, then that helps me grasp better what my horizontal relationship is to my contemporaries, or those people who are elbow-to-elbow rather than the ones who are above or below me. So when I see those axes intersecting, and I think that question or those issues could be advanced if we took them up a little bit more.
Shoniqua Roach:
Absolutely. So one last question, I'm going to give it to Michelle. I'll acknowledge a number of Afro pessimist questions, super important, but I'm going to direct you to Prof. Spiller's upcoming talk with Louis Gordon. Final question, how do you find joy?
Hortense Spillers:
How do you find joy?
Shoniqua Roach:
How do you, Professor Spillers, find joy?
Hortense Spillers:
Okay. You know, I find joy because I am to myself a very funny person. To myself, I can laugh a lot because I find the world very often a funny place. I find myself funny in it. I find other people funny in relationship to myself. I think my sense of humor was never destroyed by a world that is not always kind. It was not destroyed by the isolation that we are just coming out of. I can still laugh. I can still take joy in the company of other people. I really am a gregarious person. I mean, I really am a company loving person. In other words, a friend of mine is going to pick me up in a couple of hours and we are going to go to dinner and we will probably laugh a lot and we'll probably drink some champagne and we will have a good dinner and I will have a glass of wine with my dinner and I'll come home tickled because I'm happy. I'm not going to have to drive. Somebody else is driving the car.
Hortense Spillers:
So, I enjoy living despite the agony that I experience along with all the rest of us because the world is in a wretched state and because we're all in danger and because we live with danger. At the same time that we live in danger, we have to find a way to turn away or get enough distance from the danger to find joy. And I do that a lot. I mean, I really give myself a lot of room to be silly, to laugh, not to think about anything too much or too hard, to watch the idiot box and scream at the television, to poke fun at something, to enjoy flowers growing in the flower bed out in my yard. I mean, I make time for myself and that's the way I make joy.
Hortense Spillers:
I welcome the sunrise daily because very often I'm up at sunrise because I haven't gone to bed yet. So I take joy in the sound of the birds and I'm glad to see light in the sky, that we haven't done something stupid to drive out the sunlight. I mean, I take joy in all of that and I can do that because I think I've learned over the years, you have to give yourself distance. You have to create distance between yourself and the world. You really have to live in that interface between the world and me, or you have to act like there is an interface or an invisible line or filter that separates you from the world, that gives you that distance. You can't live without it. You know, we can't live with data coming in all the time. I mean, at some point you have to stop it and step back. And so I honor that in myself, that I can do that, and that's where the joy comes from. I can laugh even all these years later you know.
Shoniqua Roach:
Thank you for sharing that joy and brilliance with us today. I know I've learned so much. Thank you.
Hortense Spillers:
Oh, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been wonderful Shoniqua and I really appreciate the opportunity that we have to have this conversation. I wish we could have talked more about your own work.
Shoniqua Roach:
I know, but you know-
Hortense Spillers:
I would love to do that sometime.
Shoniqua Roach:
That's another conversation and I'll be in touch.
Hortense Spillers:
Okay.
Liane Hypolite:
Exactly. That that can be our next event.
Hortense Spillers:
I would love to do that.
Liane Hypolite:
Thank you both so much. Dr. Roach, thank you for facilitating, for curating beautiful questions that allowed us to learn so much about Dr. Spillers and your beautiful work and life. So thank you both for being here. Thank you to everyone who has joined us virtually. We had over 100 guests, and I think that really speaks to the value of your work and your legacy. We look forward to all of you joining us for our spring alumni college virtual series. That will be happening in the months of May and June. Next week's program is Georgia O'Keefe, a life in the inaugural event of the Brandeis University Press author series with Brandeis Professor Nancy Scott and author Roxanna Robinson on May 19th from 12:00 to 1:30 Eastern time. And we just greatly appreciate everyone's participation and your continued support of Brandeis University. So thank you for being with us in community here. Thank you to our speakers and have a nice evening everyone.