| Houston A. Baker Jr. | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 22, 1943 Louisville, Kentucky, United States |
| Occupation | writer, educator |
| Nationality | American |
| Subjects | English, African American studies |
Houston Alfred Baker Jr. (born March 22, 1943 in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American scholar specializing in African American literature and currently serving as a Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University in the English department.[1]
Baker served as president of the Modern Language Association, editor of the journal American Literature, and has authored several books, including The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, and Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing.[2][3] Baker was included in the 2006 textbook, Fifty Key Literary Theorists by Richard J. Lane.[3]
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Baker was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, which he later described as "racist" and "stultifying".[4] The racism and violence he says he experienced as a youth would later prompt him to conclude "I had been discriminated against and called 'Nigger' enough to think that what America needed was a good Black Revolution."[4] He recently revised such a summary judgment in his book combining memoir and critique titled I Don't Hate the South (Oxford University Press, 2007). His academic career initially progressed along traditional lines. He earned a B.A. in English literature from Howard University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Victorian literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. He began teaching at Yale University and intended to write a biography of Oscar Wilde.[2] In 1970 he joined the University of Virginia's Center for Advanced Studies, and from 1974 he directed the University of Pennsylvania's Afro-American Studies Program, where in 1982 he was named the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations.[3]
Baker's work in African American literary studies has been called "groundbreaking" for his ability to connect theory about the texts with the historical conditions of the beginning of the African American community, namely, both their uprooting from Africa and their ability to maintain their African heritage through an emphasis on spirituality and on autobiography, which allowed them to "reinforce and reinvent self-worth in the midst of their debasement".[3] His work in the 1970s focused on locating and mapping the origins of the "black aesthetic", such as found in the Black Arts Movement and the attendant development of anthologies, journals and monographs about African American literature.[3]
Baker's breakthrough work was 1980's The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, in which he critiques earlier discussions of the black aesthetic and calls for an interdisciplinary approach that would focus on the context of the literary works, which he claims are always "in motion".[3] Baker argues that the attempts to forge a black aesthetic in the 1960s were not simply descriptive, but actively creative and thus based on—and distorted by—the writers' idealism.[3] Baker offers history as a corrective, arguing that the black community has always created art forms in the face of oppression and that black artists need to "journey back" in order to "re-affirm the richness and complexity" of black aesthetic history and to recuperate lost aesthetic forms.[3]
Baker used this approach in his 1987 study, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, in which he takes black critics to task for accepting the common notion that the Harlem Renaissance was a failure and then shows how notions of modernism based on European and Angloamerican texts are "inappropriate for understanding Afro-American modernism".[3] He argues that by examining the literature of the Harlem Renaissance in conversation with contemporaneous developments in African American music, art and philosophy, we can identify the development of "new modes of production" that lead to a rebirth; Baker calls these modes "blues geographies".[3] Baker points to Booker T. Washington's 1895 Exposition address as the beginning of African American modernist concerns, in that Washington both adopted and subverted a minstrel mask, thus creating a post-slavery African American trope that is both useful and restrictive.[3] In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker had also argued for the importance of oral culture in the black aesthetic tradition, an idea he develops in his work on African American feminists in the essay "There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and the Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing", which stresses the connection between oral culture and autobiography.[3]
Baker's 1984 Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory had also developed his ideas about blues geographies and about orality, but had joined these ideas with developments in post-structuralism, borrowing from the work of Hegel and Derrida to argue that blues music is a "matrix", a code that acts as the foundation for African American artistic production insofar as blues music synthesizes numerous types of early African American oral genres; he develops this notion of "blues geography" through his reading of key works by Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison.[3]
In his analysis of Baker's contributions, Richard J. Lane claims that Baker's ability to connect literary theory with vernacular literature and to keep that combination connected to the material conditions of black life in the USA "provides a pedagogical model for [...] new ways of reading literature in general".[3]
In a review of Baker's 1993 Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, Terry Teachout provides a withering assessment of Baker's competence as a scholar. Teachout finds the book to be "a veritable omnium gatherum of latter-day academic clichés," and objects particularly to: "loud, flatulent praise of the Sixties"; "even louder and more flatulent denunciation of the Eighties; "pseudo-heterodoxy"; "preening"; "incessant use of tin-eared jargon"; "embarrassing use of teenage slang"; "simple ignorance"; and "plain old bad writing." "Can there really be any doubt", Teachout asks, "that a man capable of publishing such prose is demonstrably unworthy of being entrusted with the education of English majors, whatever their race, creed, color, or sexual orientation?" Teachout laments that if Baker's work is "truly representative of the best black studies has to offer, then it necessarily follows that black studies is a joke, a pitiful and preposterous burlesque of scholarship foisted on the academy in the holy name of diversity." [5]
Holding "an exceedingly pessimistic view of American social progress where race is concerned," Baker has written many books on African Americans in modern American society.[2] In his book Turning South Again: Rethinking Modernism/Rereading Booker T, he suggests that being a black American, even a successful one, amounts to a kind of prison sentence.[2]
Baker also harshly criticized US President Barack Obama's widely praised race-centered speech ("A More Perfect Union") stemming from controversial remarks given by his pastor: "Sen. Obama's 'race speech' at the National Constitution Center, draped in American flags, was reminiscent of the Parthenon concluding scene of Robert Altman's Nashville: a bizarre moment of mimicry, aping Martin Luther King Jr., while even further distancing himself from the real, economic, religious and political issues so courageously articulated by King from a Birmingham jail. In brief, Obama's speech was a pandering disaster that threw, once again, his pastor under the bus."[6]
During the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, Baker (among other members of the so called "Group of 88") published an open letter calling for Duke to dismiss the team and its players. Baker wrote that "white, male, athletic privilege" was responsible for the alleged rape.[7] Baker suggested that the Duke administration was "sweeping things under the rug."[7] More generally, Baker's letter criticized colleges and universities for the "blind-eyeing of male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain."[7] Duke Provost Peter Lange responded to Baker's letter a few days later, criticizing Baker for prejudging the team based on their race and gender, citing this as a classic tactic of racism. Lange maintained that a rush to judgment would do little to remedy the deeper problems and that open letters such as Baker's do little to further the cause of justice.[7] In 2007, charges against the players were dropped and the state's Attorney General declared the students "innocent".[8] Following the exoneration of the players, one of the parents of a Duke lacrosse player emailed Baker and reported that he responded by writing that she was "quite sadly, mother of a 'farm animal.'"[9]
Baker, Houston A. (1984). Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Houston A. (1987). Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Houston A. (1993). Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. University of Chicago Press.
Baker, Houston A. (2001). Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T. Duke University Press.
Baker, Houston A. (2009). Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era. (American Book Award)