In this chapter, the author writes at the urging of a number of friends and with some trepidation, revisiting the themes and arguments of an essay written some sixteen years ago. The “under” of Western eyes is now much more an “inside” in terms of my own location in the US academy. The author writes “Under Western Eyes” to discover and articulate a critique of “Western feminist” scholarship on Third World women via the discursive colonization of Third World women’s lives and struggles. She wants to expose the power–knowledge nexus of feminist cross-cultural scholarship expressed through Eurocentric, falsely universalizing methodologies that serve the narrow self-interest of Western feminism. “Under Western Eyes” sought to make the operations of discursive power visible, to draw attention to what was left out of feminist theorizing, namely, the material complexity, reality, and agency of Third World women’s bodies and lives.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/342914

Under Western Eyes revisited: Feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles

A century and a half after the publication of Alexis de Tocqueville's account of his visit to the United States, a mode of behavior that he may have been the first systematic social critic to identify has undergone extraordinary waves of analysis and attack. In four brief chapters in the third book of the second volume of Democracy in America, published in 1840, Tocqueville addressed the situation of women. His observations display Tocqueville's habitual charm, his fearlessness in making broad generalizations, his mastery of language. When Democracy in America was rediscovered and widely reprinted in the years after World War II, his chapters were among the few-perhaps the only-classic texts read by students of American history that seriously examined the situation of women in American society. When historians whether inspired by Simone de Beauvoir or Eleanor Flexner or Betty Friedan began again to study women's history, they could point to Tocqueville for evidence that at least one classic, Great Author had conceded the significance of their subject. Tocqueville restricted his observations on women to a section entitled "Influence of Democracy on Manners Properly So Called." He alluded to the separation of male and female spheres in the course of his contrasting and impressionistic portraits of

/pdf/separate-spheres-female-worlds-woman-s-place-the-rhetoric-of-2tgz36p27x.pdf

Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History

PrefaceOpening: In the Realm of the Diamond Queen3Pt. 1Politics of the Periphery391Marginal Fictions512Government Headhunters723Family Planning104Pt. 2A Science of Travel1214Leadership Landscapes1275Conditions of Living1546On the Boundary of the Skin178Pt. 3Riding the Horse of Gaps2077Alien Romance2138Riding, Writing2309The History of the World253Reprise285Notes303References Cited311Index335

In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place

The Haraway Reader brings together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work, she is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world and this volume is ideal introduction to her thought.

The Haraway Reader

What is the relationship between common sense categories of experience and analytical concepts developed in order to understand the processes that produce such categories and effect their taken-for-grantedness? This question is crucial for those working on nationalism, ethnicity, and state formation. Much of the misplaced concreteness that bedevils this scholarship results from an uncritical reproduction of common sense that poses intellectual as well as political problems_

The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism, and Ethnicity

Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2006 SE Thank you, Hortense, for making time to talk with us. Jennifer and I are really grateful that the three of you came out on a Saturday evening. Can we begin with Farah and Saidiya talking about how "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" has influenced your work, and then maybe Hortense can begin with discussing how you teach or talk about it. FG There are times when I've specifically gone to the essay, knowing that there's something in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" that will be helpful and useful to me, and then there are times later on I realize without even knowing it consciously, the article has informed and influenced things that I have done. I wrote this essay called "Textual Healing" and I started out by using your sources, by asking, where did she get that information?! How did she even know to go these particular sources? For so many of us, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" was the first time we even thought about some of the things that you cited. When I wrote that essay, which is really about what we call neoslave narratives now, trying to think about the history that these women writers were responding to, the frame that I was beginning to understand, that history was set up for me by "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe." I was writing a review essay for Signs on black feminism in the academy, and as I began to talk about Hortense Spillers, I realized that the work of so many people of my generation has been formed in relationship to this essay. I was focusing on literary critics-Sharon Holland, Elizabeth Alexander, Fred Moten, Lindon Barrett, all of us-and I thought how I literally could not think of another essay, I don't know-maybe "The Souls of Black Folk?"-I really couldn't think of another essay that had that kind of impact on a generation. The essay has profoundly informed my work and the work of the people with whom I consider myself in dialogue. SH Indebtedness is the word that comes to mind that I would use to describe my relation to Hortense's work. That's how I would summarize it. I mean I am still struggling with the problematic terms that "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" has generated, I am still thinking through Hortense's prism. I do have a question about how feminism as a critique or a rubric explains or fails to explain your own critical intervention. It's interesting in that the first paragraph of the essay opens with all the names of the marked woman, but in the second paragraph it's the problem of the color line that explains the territory in which that naming takes place. I'd like to think about your own project's relationship to feminism. I think it has a critical relationship to that project but I don't think that your work can be encompassed by the feminist project. HS You know, I have always been very interested and humbled by people's response to "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe." What I was trying to do when I wrote that essay many years ago was to find a vocabulary that would make it possible, and not all by myself, to make a contribution to a larger project. I was looking for my generation of black women who were so active in other ways, to open a conversation with feminists. Because my idea about where we found ourselves in the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, was that we were really out of the conversation that we had, in some ways, historically initiated. In other words, the women's movement and the black movement have always been in tandem, but what I saw happening was black people being treated as a kind of raw material. That the history of black people was something you could use as a note of inspiration but it was never anything that had anything to do with you-you could never use it to explain something in theoretical terms. There was no discourse that it generated, in terms of the mainstream academy that gave it a kind of recognition. And so my idea was to try to generate a discourse, or a vocabulary that would not just make it desirable, but would necessitate that black women be in the conversation. …

"Whatcha Gonna Do?"-Revisiting "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book"

Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe

"Black, White and in Colour" offers a long-awaited collection of major essays by Hortense Spillers, one of the most influential and inspiring black critics of the past 20 years. Spanning her work from the early 1980s, in which she pioneered a broadly poststructuralist approach to African American literature, and extending through her turn to cultural studies in the 1990s, these essays display her passionate commitment to reading as a fundamentally political act - one pivotal to rewriting the humanist project. Spillers is probably best known for her race-centred revision of psychoanalytic theory and for her subtle account of the relationships between race and gender. She has also given literary criticism some of its most powerful readings of individual authors, represented here in seminal essays on Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, and William Faulkner. Other essays such as "Who Cuts the Border?" consider the effect of migration on the black cultural experience. "Moving on Down the Line" opens a fascinating window onto the African American sermon. "A Hateful Passion, a Lost Love" contrasts fiction by Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurtston and Margaret Walker. A new preface and introduction that appear here for the first time trace the trajectory of the author's career and point the way toward new lines of inquiry. Ultimately, the essays collected in "Black, White and in Colour" all share Spillers's signature style: heady, eclectic, and astonishingly productive of new ideas. Anyone interested in African American culture and literature should want to read them.

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

What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumptions known to us as "America?" Since the American hemisphere actually encompasses a variety of national identities, can it make sense to speak of a unified "American" identity? Can a place for marginalized identities be established within the cultural mainstream? Comparative American Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of "New World" cultural identities, questions and problems. The essays attempt to locate "America" as a cultural and historical site of plurality and division, a discursive space of multiple differences which becomes, paradoxically, the ground for a new notion of American unity.

Hortense J. Spillers

Papers

Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book

"Whatcha Gonna Do?"-Revisiting "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book"

Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe

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

Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text.