Hortense Spillers Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Hortense Spillers, organized by topic.
Hortense Spillers on Politics
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Attributed to Hortense Spillers:
“Before the body is a political subject, the body is the captive flesh of an American grammar.”
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Attributed to Hortense Spillers:
“The Middle Passage was the disciplining of bodies into a category of property.”
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Attributed to Hortense Spillers:
“Race is not a noun in the American sentence; it is a tense and a voice.”
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Attributed to Hortense Spillers:
“The Black woman is the figure on which the gendered grammar of the West breaks down.”
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Attributed to Hortense Spillers:
“We are still in search of the words for what slavery did to the language.”