Co-sponsore
d by the President's Office and the Centre for Culture\, Education\, and Id
entity
Even though North America consists of three nation states and
the linguistic and cultural differences that go along with geopolitical
division\, the populations of the Continent have\, for the most par
t\, no experience\, either actual or intellectual\, or drastically limited
experience\, with the concept of borders and border crossings\; it even se
ems that passage from Canada into the United States and the United States i
nto Canada is blessed with beneficence\, while movement from Mexico into th
e United States and vice-versa\, or into the US from other southern ports o
f call beyond the country\, evokes images of danger and carnage\; what can
be said about the border that would explicate these decisive differences\,
and in what ways have the latter become even more marked and recalcitrant i
n light of disease and political disorder\, especially in the United States
? “At the Margins” attempts to set out these questions.
Dr. Hortense Spillers is an American literary crit
ic\, Black Feminist scholar\, the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor at
Vanderbilt University and Honorary Professor of The Social Justice Institut
e.
A scholar of the African diaspora\, Spil
lers is known for her essays on African-American literature in Black\, W
hite\, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture\, publis
hed by the University of Chicago Press in 2003 and Comparative American
Identities: Race\, Sex\, and Nationality in the Modern Text\, published
by Routledge in 1991. She is especially known for having written several i
nfluential interventions in the field of psychoanalysis\, race and gender.
In her work\, she contests psychoanalytical clichés found in literature fro
m Freud to Fanon\; questions white gender and family norms\; challenges pol
icy\, psychoanalytic and white feminist discourse\; and opposes the financi
al and mental costs that occur through the subjection of education to globa
l capital.
Her key strategy is to not stop
at mere critique\, but to suggest models that keep being dismissed or demon
ized as potentially valuable alternative models\, as seen for instance in h
er famous 1987 essay\, ‘Mama’s Baby\, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Boo
k’\, on African American gender construction. Spillers’s work has also been
celebrated for her skill in innovative writing techniques and ability to w
eave together seemingly disparate topics and lines of argumentation.
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in-the-age-of-a-pandemic-with-dr-hortese-spillers/
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