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

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…