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[...]the body is to the \"feminine\" as Tharmas is to a wide set of human abilities and capacities. In Letter XIII of this text, which Spillers cites as \"considerably influential on [her] own thinking\" (\"'An Order'\" 226n10), Schiller elaborates two \"contradictory\" \"tendencies\" or \"impulsions\" of human beings: the sensuous impulsion that \"desires change\" and the formal or rational impulsion that \"seeks unity and permanence.\" [...]the second conceptual move in Spillers's introduction (her reference to Schiller) complicates this third point, for she seems to theorize the \"feminine,\" on the one hand, neither as sex nor gender even as, on the other, she remains \"struck by the evidence of the 'common senses' in speculating that the woman's intimate proximity to the theme of human continuance and nurture is prime material for her cultural apprenticeship in the feelings and notions of receptivity\"-all components that Schiller associates with \"extensivity,\" the sensuous, non-rational impulsion of human being (226n10). [...]Spillers holds fast to the principle that for a construct to be in play within a culture or a symbolic order that flesh-and-blood persons (traditionally, in this case, women) have to live that construct out historically.

This essay takes the notion of “flesh” as the point of departure for exploring the viability and contemporary relevance of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “ontological psychoanalysis”. Primary interlocutors will be Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Hortense Spillers’s essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”.

The harmful legacy of Paul's image of [phrase omitted] (\"flesh\") demands a rethinking of the term's meaning in the allegory of Hagar in Gal 4:21-5:1. [phrase omitted] has been viewed as a spiritualized metaphor for sin, a connection that has perpetuated a racist sanction of slavery and a gendered, sexualized condemnation of materiality. In dialogue with Hortense Spillers's paradigm-shifting notion of the flesh, I explore the powerful and painful images in this passage with attention to their embodied, social, and structural elements. In Spillers's formulation, the flesh is a locus of the structural dispossession, dehumanization, and ungendering of African and African American people under the logics of American slavery, whereas the body is a locus of white people's violent advantage. I propose that in Galatians Paul's [phrase omitted] indicates vulnerability and wounding, in contrast to the security indicated by the image of the [phrase omitted] (\"spirit\"). Galatians associates Hagar and Ishmael with the [phrase omitted], not to distance this enslaved family from the divine but rather to call attention to the social disenfranchisement of both mother and son.

This article offers a reading of Walker's insurgency, arguing that his unique typographical performance usurps dominant grammatical and rhetorical forms (italics, em-dashes, negative questions, shifting pronouns, commas, metonymic slippages, and repetition) in order to scramble the governing anti-Black episteme, wherein language is variously deployed to suppress, elide, mask, legitimize, and normalize the violence of anti-Blackness. By stalling the normal interpellative operations of America's formal grammatical and rhetorical infrastructures, Walker advances a theorization of anti-Blackness as an ontological problem while simultaneously deforming its rhetorical structuring vis-à-vis an ungovernable, fugitive inhabitation.

Conservative women's activist groups, such as organizations like Moms for America and its sister group Moms for Liberty, have played a significant role in challenging CRT and other progressive, antiracist curricular policies. And, within the rhetorics employed by these groups, motherhood assumes a pivotal role with historical precedent. Indeed, such groups mobilize women's role as mothers to frame the fight against antiracist education in terms of care for the children of this nation. This crafty rhetorical move helps unify women in the Christian right and imbues their struggle with a dose of motherly common sense. Here, Ribero proposes that conservative women's organizations drive the attacks against CRT by mobilizing the figure of the \"valiant mother,\" an archetype that represents a contemporary manifestation of US white motherhood politics and embodies qualities of whiteness, religious devotion, and a specific brand of twenty-first century right-wing patriotism. She focuses on the women's group Moms for America to show how the \"valiant mother\" is constructed rhetorically as a countercultural figure of the post-pandemic era, characterized by her indomitable spirit, religious fervor, and leadership within her home and community.

This essay proposes that Romantic studies needs to overhaul its canonical theories of language in order to contend with the rhetoric of racialization that underwrites and sustains structures of antiblackness. Scholarship often casts the apparent instability of race in the period as potentially liberatory, having derived its ideas about rhetoricity from the tradition of rhetorical deconstruction. Arguing that this tendency is both historically and theoretically misguided, the essay identifies an alternative model of rhetorical reading in the work of Hortense Spillers and develops its implications through analyzing a couplet from Mary Robinson's \"The Negro Girl\" (1800).

This article explores the connection between the extraction and dispossession of human reproductive labor power and its products in the contexts of Atlantic slavery and contemporary biocapitalism.  It argues that the conceptualization and practice of slave reproduction that sustained slave racial capitalism is forwarded into the biocapitalist present through “the slave episteme.”  This becomes evident when reproduction in biocapitalism is viewed through the lens of the long history of slave “breeding” in the Atlantic world. While the “blackness” that enslavers attributed to enslaved mothers and their progeny objectified and dehumanized both and rationalized their treatment as fungible and alienable commodities, in contempory biocapitalism the racial formation that subtends reproductive extraction and dispossession has been complexly recalibrated to do related ideological and material work. The article concludes with a discussion of the sublation of “blackness” in contemporary market exchanges in which reproductive labor and its products are bought and sold.

Often overlooked by James Baldwin criticism or addressed according to its unique relationship to sex and gender, love plays a central role in the writer’s oeuvre. This article, conceived as a contrapuntal reading between A Dialogue (1972)—the transcript of a four-hour conversation between James Baldwin and poet Nikki Giovanni in November 1971—and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Baldwin’s fifth novel, will shed light on Baldwin’s “poethics” of love in the 1970s, after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and the author’s engagement with Black Power and feminism. This revision takes its cues from intersectionality and extends them via Hortense Spillers’s bold critique of Baldwin’s politics of intimacy, his writing style, and the American family grammar. His vision of love as moral “energy” not only anticipates what Denise Ferreira da Silva terms a “Black Feminist Poethics,” but is also a potential “key” to end “the racial nightmare” and “save the children,” thereby becoming a poethics of love for the infancy of the world.

The harmful legacy of Paul’s image of σάρξ (“flesh”) demands a rethinking of the term’s meaning in the allegory of Hagar in Gal 4:21–5:1. Σάρξ has been viewed as a spiritualized metaphor for sin, a connection that has perpetuated a racist sanction of slavery and a gendered, sexualized condemnation of materiality. In dialogue with Hortense Spillers’s paradigm-shifting notion of the flesh, I explore the powerful and painful images in this passage with attention to their embodied, social, and structural elements. In Spillers’s formulation, the flesh is a locus of the structural dispossession, dehumanization, and ungendering of African and African American people under the logics of American slavery, whereas the body is a locus of white people’s violent advantage. I propose that in Galatians Paul’s σάρξ indicates vulnerability and wounding, in contrast to the security indicated by the image of the πνɛῦμα (“spirit”). Galatians associates Hagar and Ishmael with the σάρξ, not to distance this enslaved family from the divine but rather to call attention to the social disenfranchisement of both mother and son.