Hortense Spillers b. 1942

Hortense J. Spillers is an American Black feminist literary critic and philosopher, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English emerita at Vanderbilt University, and one of the most influential voices of late-twentieth-century American thought on race, gender, and the legacy of slavery. Her 1987 essay Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book reread the institution of chattel slavery as a sustained operation on the gendered flesh of the captive, in which gender as a Western category collapsed under the weight of the slave-trade and a different American grammar of the body emerged. Black, White, and in Color and her many essays on race, psychoanalysis, and the academy have shaped a generation of Black feminist and Africana thought.