I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

I Don't Hate The South takes its title from the famous declaration by Faulkner's character Quentin Compson in the novel Absalom, Absalom!. The book traces Baker's own ambivalent relationship to the South and its various protocols of family and black expressive cultural independence through a memoiristic recounting of the author's various academic posts, family dramas, travels, and engagements with that most famous of southern authors, William Faulkner as well as the black expressive "experimentalists" Percival Everett and Ralph Ellison. I Don't Hate The South's central claim is that the South is a laboratory, metaphor, and proving ground for American polity as a whole. W. E. B. Du Bois noted: "As the South goes, so goes the nation!" Houston Baker sets out to show the present-day wisdom of Du Bois's observation in a post-Hurricane Katrina moment of national family crisis. With incisive wit, scrupulous literary and cultural analysis, and vivid portraits of members of his own family, the author provides captivating reading and an object lesson on the United States' regional and national interdependence.

Literature & Fiction

Baker Jr., Houston A.

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

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.

Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Black Literature and Culture)

University of Chicago Press

History

Americas

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

Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Black Literature and Culture)

"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

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

Arts & Photography

"Professor Baker offers the richest analysis we have of black literature in its full cultural context. A superb literary critic, a sophisticated student of culture and society, Baker is himself a very talented writer, deeply engaged in the literary-cultural 'journey' he describes. The result is a major work of interdisciplinary scholarship and humanistic criticism which will remain for years to come an authoritative treatment of the subject. The Journey Back is a landmark not only in the study of black literature but in American studies in general. No one interested in our culture can afford to ignore it."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Columbia University

The Journey Back

"Professor Baker offers the richest analysis we have of black literature in its full cultural context. A superb literary critic, a sophisticated student of culture and society, Baker is himself a very talented writer, deeply engaged in the literary-cultural 'journey' he describes. The result is a major work of interdisciplinary scholarship and humanistic criticism which will remain for years to come an authoritative treatment of the subject. The Journey Back is a landmark not only in the study of black literature but in American studies in general. No one interested in our culture can afford to ignore it."—Sacvan Bercovitch, Columbia University

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.

Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture

University of Virginia Press

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.

Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Ser.)

University of Georgia Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baker Jr., Houston A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Baker Jr., Houston A.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baker Jr., Houston A.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Black Literature and Culture)

Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy (Black Literature and Culture)

Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (Black Literature and Culture)

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

The Journey Back

The Journey Back

Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture

Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (Georgia Southern University Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Ser.)