SATURDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2006 SE Thank you, Hortense, for making time to talk with us. Jennifer and I are really grateful that the three of you came out on a Saturday evening. Can we begin with Farah and Saidiya talking about how Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe has influenced your work, and then maybe Hortense can begin with discussing how you teach or talk about it. FG There are times when I've specifically gone to the essay, knowing that there's something in Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe that will be helpful and useful to me, and then there are times later on I realize without even knowing it consciously, the article has informed and influenced things that I have done. I wrote this essay called Textual Healing and I started out by using your sources, by asking, where did she get that information?! How did she even know to go these particular sources? For so many of us, Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe was the first time we even thought about some of the things that you cited. When I wrote that essay, which is really about what we call neoslave narratives now, trying to think about the history that these women writers were responding to, the frame that I was beginning to understand, that history was set up for me by Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe. I was writing a review essay for Signs on black feminism in the academy, and as I began to talk about Hortense Spillers, I realized that the work of so many people of my generation has been formed in relationship to this essay. I was focusing on literary critics-Sharon Holland, Elizabeth Alexander, Fred Moten, Lindon Barrett, all of us-and I thought how I literally could not think of another essay, I don't know-maybe Souls of Black Folk?-I really couldn't think of another essay that had that kind of impact on a generation. The essay has profoundly informed my work and the work of the people with whom I consider myself in dialogue. SH Indebtedness is the word that comes to mind that I would use to describe my relation to Hortense's work. That's how I would summarize it. I mean I am still struggling with the problematic terms that Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe has generated, I am still thinking through Hortense's prism. I do have a question about how feminism as a critique or a rubric explains or fails to explain your own critical intervention. It's interesting in that the first paragraph of the essay opens with all the names of the marked woman, but in the second paragraph it's the problem of the color line that explains the territory in which that naming takes place. I'd like to think about your own project's relationship to feminism. I think it has a critical relationship to that project but I don't think that your work can be encompassed by the feminist project. HS You know, I have always been very interested and humbled by people's response to Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe. What I was trying to do when I wrote that essay many years ago was to find a vocabulary that would make it possible, and not all by myself, to make a contribution to a larger project. I was looking for my generation of black women who were so active in other ways, to open a conversation with feminists. Because my idea about where we found ourselves in the late 1970s and the mid-1980s, was that we were really out of the conversation that we had, in some ways, historically initiated. In other words, the women's movement and the black movement have always been in tandem, but what I saw happening was black people being treated as a kind of raw material. That the history of black people was something you could use as a note of inspiration but it was never anything that had anything to do with you-you could never use it to explain something in theoretical terms. There was no discourse that it generated, in terms of the mainstream academy that gave it a kind of recognition. And so my idea was to try to generate a discourse, or a vocabulary that would not just make it desirable, but would necessitate that black women be in the conversation. …
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