Hortense Spillers is one of the most important literary critics and Black feminist scholars of the last fifty years. Her 1987 scholarly article “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” is one of the most-cited essays in African American literary studies. This essays in this collection demonstrate a fidelity to the ways of reading Spillers has taught us.
Margo Natalie Crawford is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
C. Riley Snorton is the Mary R. Morton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.