NeMLA 2026 (Panel) Regenerative Blackness—Skin, Flesh, and the Future of Being
In her essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers articulates the enduring violence of racial enslavement through the concept of the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). This term marks how the captive body, stripped of legal and social personhood, became inscribed with meaning through the violence of racial differentiation. This transformation rendered the Black body not only a surface upon which terror was written but also a metaphysical site from which alternative modes of being might be imagined. In attending to the duality of skin and flesh, Spillers distinguishes between Black skin as legible and social, and Black flesh as ungendered, unsovereign, and open—both wounded and full of radical potential.