Blog post 7 Farah and Mario

This week, I (Farah) would like to start out thinking about discourse in terms of race in Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” I chose this piece specifically because I’ve read it in my undergrad and will be reading it in a week in the other seminar I’m in, and it’s a difficult piece. When I read it last year, nobody in my class really understood it and we didn’t spend much time getting into it, so this week I’m going to struggle through it.

In terms of discourse, Spillers place a lot of weight on the epistemological power of naming. She opens the essay up listing out the various names or identities that may have been given her both now and historically: Peaches, brown Sugar, Sapphire, Earth Mother, Aunty, Granny, God’s Holy Fool, Miss Ebony First, Black Woman at the Podium. It seems that what she is getting at is the power of naming (language, at large, maybe) is informed by time and history. “I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness. The personal pronouns offered in the service of a collective function (65). So, naming and “pronouns” are both a historical and a collective function. This means that in order to deconstruct her current “name” (?) she needs to look through history.

From this point, she moves into a discussion of the Moynihan report, and its impact on the cultural naming practices that it forced into discourse. This also where she delves more deeply into the idea of gender and sex and she also uses some psychoanalysis here. She outlines how the Moynihan report enacts a “stunning reversal of the castration thematic, displacing the Name and the Law of the Father to the territory of the Mother and Daughter, becomes an aspect of the African-American female’s misnaming” (66). She looks at the Moynihan report as a tool that erased blackness, using the term “negation” in how it constructed a binary between “white” “American” families and “black” families.

From her discussion of the Moynihan report, Spillers then moves into an analysis of discourse of bodies and flesh in terms of gender. All of this was difficult for me, but from what I could understand, she places a huge emphasis on the difference between “body” and “flesh,” writing “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (67). So, by going back to the flesh as primary, she undoes the American colonial discourse around gender construction.

Farah does a great job at looking at the different ways Spillers leads to her main argument of flesh. I will try to build upon some aspects of what Farah points out. First of all, I think it is important to recognize how derridian Spillers article is. Mainly, she has similar echoes of the incest prohibition- when Derrida discusses the division of culture/ nature and how it is complicated in Levi Strauss’s work, how the discussion of family within slavery and is influenced by a system or closed “structure” that has a free play of signifiers: meaning that the attempts to escape that language -even with abolitionist language- is not done (?), and finally she even talks of the monstrosity that comes with aspect of the incest prohibition but uses it as a form of empowerment.

Now with this in mind, I will turn to the aspect of the flesh that is discussed at the end of Spillers paper. She provides an interesting though at the end of a paradox and this makes me wonder, going back to Derrida if the paradox she speaks is a form of absence:

In this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to "name"), which her culture imposes in blindness, "Sapphire" might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment.  (80)

Prior to this quote, Spillers explains how the African American must accept the female within as part of his personhood. She also mentions how the African American female is negated twice, placing her out in different subjectivity between physical and cultural reproduction. The paradox, in essence  seems to show the African American female has no place between culture and nature (putting Derrida back into this) and is the absence found within a structure or field of free play. Thus Spillers seems to take this absence in recognized subjecthood  as something empowering. To be a monster, as Spillers comments, an incest prohibition, allows for a creation of a different form of subjectivity that is empowering and rids itself  of the restrictive subjectivity found within the language and culture built upon the slave apparatus. Hence the flesh, the in between the layers of language between both reproductions allows for empowerment which i thought was fascinating.