Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s Books

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

A Vernacular Theory

By: Houston A. Baker

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Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

A Vernacular Theory

By: Houston A. Baker

Relating the blues to American social and literary history and to Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr., offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. He shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the American narrative and characteristic of the Afro-American way of telling it.

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240

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022616084X

ISBN 13

9780226160849

Betrayal

How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

By: Houston A. Baker

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Betrayal

How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

By: Houston A. Baker

Houston A. Baker Jr. condemns black intellectuals who, he believes, have turned their backs on the tradition of racial activism in America. In their literature, speeches, and academic and public behavior, Baker identifies a "hungry generation" eager for power, respect, and money. Critiquing his own impoverished childhood in the "Little Africa" section of Louisville, Kentucky, Baker seeks to understand the shaping of this new public figure. He also revisits classical sites of African American literary and historical criticism and critique, and devotes chapters to the writing and thought of such black academic superstars as Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele; Yale law professor Stephen Carter; and Manhattan Institute fellow John McWhorter. Baker's provocative investigation into the disingenuous posturing of these and other individuals exposes what he deems to be a tragic betrayal of the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He urges black intellectuals to reestablish both sacred and secular connections with local communities and rediscover the value of social responsibility. As Baker sees it, the mission of the black intellectual today is not to do great things but to do specific, racially based work that is in the interest of the black majority.

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268

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231139659

ISBN 13

9780231139656

Workings of the Spirit

The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing

By: Houston A. Baker (Jr.)

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Workings of the Spirit

The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing

By: Houston A. Baker (Jr.)

Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, the author weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against his own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of Afro-American intellectual history.

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270

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226035239

ISBN 13

9780226035239

Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy

By: Houston A. Baker, Jr.

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Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy

By: Houston A. Baker, Jr.

In this explosive book, Houston Baker takes stock of the current state of Black Studies in the university and outlines its responsibilities to the newest form of black urban expression—rap. A frank, polemical essay, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy is an uninhibited defense of Black Studies and an extended commentary on the importance of rap. Written in the midst of the political correctness wars and in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Baker's meditation on the academy and black urban expression has generated much controversy and comment from both ends of the political spectrum.

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123

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022616733X

ISBN 13

9780226167336

Keywords for Southern Studies

By: Thomas F. Haddox,Eric G. Anderson,Sylvia Shin-Huey Chong,Houston A. Baker

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Keywords for Southern Studies

By: Thomas F. Haddox,Eric G. Anderson,Sylvia Shin-Huey Chong,Houston A. Baker

In Keywords for Southern Studies, the editors have compiled an eclectic collection of essays which address the fluidity and ever-changing nature of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. This book is termed 'critical' because the essays in it are pertinent to modern life beyond the world of 'southern studies.' The non-binary, non-traditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refuses the binary thinking -- First World/Third World, self/other -- that postcolonial studies has taught us is the worst rhetorical structure of empire. Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that starts with southern studies but extends even further"--

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423

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820349615

ISBN 13

9780820349619

Turning South Again

Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.

By: Houston A. Baker

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Turning South Again

Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.

By: Houston A. Baker

DIVInaugurates a new southern studies with Black experience at the center, through a re-examination of the career of Booker T. Washington, showing incarceration to be the central characteristic of African-American life, even in the case of Tuskegee./div

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132

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Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822326957

ISBN 13

9780822326953

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

A Vernacular Theory

By: Houston A. Baker, Jr.

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Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

A Vernacular Theory

By: Houston A. Baker, Jr.

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295

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226035360

ISBN 13

9780226035369

Afro-American Poetics

Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic

By: Houston A. Baker (Jr.)

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Afro-American Poetics

Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic

By: Houston A. Baker (Jr.)

Baker envisages the mission of black culture since the 1920s as "Afro-American spirit work." In the blues, the post-modernist "chant poem," the oratory of Malcolm X and the political plays of Amiri Baraka, Baker notes the unfolding creation of a "racial epic" in which black Americans may discover their place in U.S. society and find their ancestral roots. He analyzes Jean Toomer's stream-of-consciousness protest novel Cane, ponders why apolitical poet Countee Cullen became a voice of the people and pays tribute to critic-poet Larry Neal and to Hoyt Fuller, the editor of Negro Digest who allied himself with the Black Arts movement. He also traces his own shift from "guerrilla theater revolutionary" to embattled theoretician. ISBN 0-299-11500-3: $22.50 (For use only in the library).

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220

Publisher

Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0299115046

ISBN 13

9780299115043

Critical Memory

Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America

By: Houston A. Baker

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Critical Memory

Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America

By: Houston A. Baker

From the lone outcry of Richard Wright's Black Boy to the chorusing voices of Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, Critical Memory looks across the past half century to assess the current challenges to African American cultural and intellectual life. As Houston A. Baker recalls his own youth in Louisville, Kentucky, and Washington, D.C., he situates such figures as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Shelby Steele, O. J. Simpson, Chris Rock, and Jesse Jackson within such issues as the embattled state of African American manhood and the "financing and promotion of black intellectuals." The "memory" of the book's title is doubly "critical." It is imperative, Baker says, that we keep alive the "embarrassing, macabre, and always bizarre" memory of race in America. In another respect, the remembering must be pointed and keen enough to discern truth from its often highly politicized, commercialized trappings. Throughout the book, Baker returns again and again to the triad of race, "likability" (the compromises by which one gains credibility in white America), and "clearance" (the separation of blacks from the "rights, spaces, and privileges of American citizenship"). These concepts, Baker argues, gird the meritocracy, still in force, that claimed progress in granting black men like his father the freedom to work themselves to death behind a desk instead of a mule. In Critical Memory reason and cool rage converge to expose the draining tasks of reconciling white America's perception of its righteousness with its lack of relish for the truth it claims to welcome from black intellectuals and artists.

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124

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820322407

ISBN 13

9780820322407

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

A Vernacular Theory

By: Houston A. Baker

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Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature

A Vernacular Theory

By: Houston A. Baker

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240

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226035387

ISBN 13

9780226035383

The Journey Back

By: Houston A. Baker (Jr.)

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The Journey Back

By: Houston A. Baker (Jr.)

Assesses 18th-century black writers, the autobiographical writings of slaves, the works of Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Baraka, and Brooks, and traditional approaches to African-American literature.

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220

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226035352

ISBN 13

9780226035352

Critical Memory

Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America

By: Houston A. Baker

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Critical Memory

Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America

By: Houston A. Baker

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124

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University of Georgia Press

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ISBN 10

0820322407

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9780820322407

I Don't Hate the South

Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

By: Houston A. Baker

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I Don't Hate the South

Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

By: Houston A. Baker

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218

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195326555

ISBN 13

9780195326550

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

By: Houston A. Baker

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Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

By: Houston A. Baker

Mr. Baker perceives the harlem Renaissance as a crucial moment in a movement, predating the 1920's, when Afro-Americans embraced the task of self-determination and in so doing gave forth a distinctive form of expression that still echoes in a broad spectrum of 20th-century Afro-American arts. . . . Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance may well become Afro-America's 'studying manual.'"—Tonya Bolden, New York Times Book Review

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144

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022615629X

ISBN 13

9780226156293

Long Black Song

Essays in Black American Literature and Culture

By: Houston A. Baker

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Long Black Song

Essays in Black American Literature and Culture

By: Houston A. Baker

Houston Baker maintains that black American culture, grounded in a unique historical experience, is distinct from any other, and that it has produced a body of literature that is equally and demonstrably unique in its sources, values, and modes of expression. He argues that black American literature is rooted in black folklore- animal tales, trickster slave tales, religious tales, folk songs, spirituals, and ballads- and that a knowledge of this tradition is essential to the understanding of any individual black author or work. To deomonstrate the continuity of this tradition, Baker examines themes that appear in folklore and persist throughout contemporary black literature. "Freedom and Apocalypse," for example, traces the idea that black Americans are a chosen people who will, by some violent means, overthrow the white man's tyranny. The essays culminate in an examination of the life and work of Richard Wright. Baker's treatment of Wright as a black American artist who recorded the black man's shift from an agrarian to an urban setting places Wright and the tradition of black literature and culture in a fresh perspective.

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180

Publisher

University of Virginia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0813913012

ISBN 13

9780813913018

Betrayal

How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

By: Houston A. Baker

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Betrayal

How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

By: Houston A. Baker

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Page Count

268

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231139659

ISBN 13

9780231139656

Turning South Again

Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.

By: Houston A. Baker

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Turning South Again

Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.

By: Houston A. Baker

In Turning South Again the distinguished and award-winning essayist, poet, and scholar of African American literature Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers a revisionist account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. With a take on the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute surprisingly different from that in his earlier book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and whiteness studies to argue that the American South and its regulating institutions—particularly that of incarceration—have always been at the center of the African American experience. From the holds of slave ships to the peonage of Reconstruction to the contemporary prison system, incarceration has largely defined black life in the United States. Even Washington’s school at Tuskegee, Baker explains, housed and regulated black bodies no longer directly controlled by slave owners. He further implicates Washington by claiming that in enacting his ideas about racial “uplift,” Washington engaged in “mulatto modernism,” a compromised attempt at full citizenship. Combining autobiographical prose, literary criticism, psychoanalytic writing, and, occasionally, blues lyrics and poetry, Baker meditates on the consequences of mulatto modernism for the project of black modernism, which he defines as the achievement of mobile, life-enhancing participation in the public sphere and economic solvency for the majority of African Americans. By including a section about growing up in the South, as well as his recent return to assume a professorship at Duke, Baker contributes further to one of the book’s central concerns: a call to centralize the South in American cultural studies.

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127

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Duke University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0822380056

ISBN 13

9780822380054

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

By: Houston A. Baker

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Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

By: Houston A. Baker

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144

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University of Chicago Press

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ISBN 10

022615629X

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9780226156293

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

By: Houston A. Baker, Jr.

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Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

By: Houston A. Baker, Jr.

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132

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226035247

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9780226035246

Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy

By: Houston A. Baker,Houston A. Baker, Jr.

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Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy

By: Houston A. Baker,Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Traces the history of black studies as an academic discipline. Looks specifically at the incidence of urban rap music and its influence on the young urban black population. Highlights the spate of attacks in New York's Central Park in 1990 and the consequent legal action against rap band 2 Live Crew.

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126

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226035212

ISBN 13

9780226035215

Keywords for Southern Studies

By: Thomas F. Haddox,Eric G. Anderson,Sylvia Shin-Huey Chong,Houston A. Baker

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Keywords for Southern Studies

By: Thomas F. Haddox,Eric G. Anderson,Sylvia Shin-Huey Chong,Houston A. Baker

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423

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820349615

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9780820349619

Workings of the Spirit

The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing

By: Houston A. Baker

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Workings of the Spirit

The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing

By: Houston A. Baker

Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, Workings of the Spirit weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against Baker's own explanation of the founding, theoretical state of Afro-American intellectual history."Brilliant, and tenderly riveted to gratitude as an indispensable facet of analysis, Houston Baker arrives, yet again, bearing the loveliest flowers of his devotion and delight: thank God he's here!"-June Jordan

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239

Published Date

ISBN 10

0788152874

ISBN 13

9780788152870

Book's by Houston A. Baker, Jr.

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