Art & Architecture: Article Review You Might Want To Emulate

Hortense Spillers “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book” was written when the author was looking for her generation of black women in the late 1970s and the mid-1980s. The history of black people has never been given the kind of recognition it is entitled to. The beginning of the essay provides several reflections on naming and the author opens a series of thoughts on the use of overdetermined nominative properties to describe black women. She describes how the everyday terminology is deeply historically embedded and it will need going back in time to undo what is done. The black women are seen to be historically dysfunctional and out of step with the national patriarchal family structure of the Americans. She constructs a binary opposition between “white” and “black” family structures. She suggests that the notorious Middle Passage and American enslavement represents a zero social conceptualization and the captive flesh demarcates human personality and cultural institutions. The idea of “American grammar” is based on the aspects of African-American life in the United States and the violent formation of a modern African consciousness. The slavery is not just those dehumanizing historical moments but represents deeper construction of the ways the Europeans and white Americans systems. There is a lack of information on how the black family structure developed within slavery and “freedom.” Spillers concludes with how gender was configured for the black men and women through slavery and its aftermath and how their illegitimacy lacked something fundamentally American. Spiller’s essay gives essential food for thought on how identities get formed through complex deliveries of power and how one should not take concepts like American to be fixed. When comparing her work with Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” it is true that little has been said on the plight of Black women and their issues. African Americans all over the world have faced socio-economic inequalities. While Spiller’s essay represents a powerful critical intervention of the normative gender constructions of what it means to be a man or woman, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” sheds light on how the black women writers have been treated differently from the white women writers. Both essays touch the lines of race, class, and gender prevailing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.