Houston A. Baker

Houston Alfred Baker junior (born March 22, 1943 in Louisville , Kentucky ) is an American, African-American literary scholar. He is known for contributions to African American literary criticism and cultural studies.

Baker grew up in Louisville and studied English at Howard University with a bachelor's degree in 1965 (magna cum laude), at Edinburgh University and at the University of California, Los Angeles , with a master's degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1968. At that time he dealt with Victorian English literature, for example Oscar Wilde . He taught at Yale University , Cornell University , Haverford College and was at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia from 1970 . From 1974 to 1977 he headed the Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania , where he was Professor of English from 1977 to 1999. From 1982 he was Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations and in 1987 he founded the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, of which he was director until 1999. From 1999 he was Susan Fox and George D. Beischer Professor at Duke University and from 2006 Distinguished Professor at Vanderbilt University .

Baker had his breakthrough with the book The Journey Back . Since then, he has criticized an idealizing image of Afro-American aesthetics that had to be corrected through interdisciplinary research that also had to address the special social and cultural backgrounds of African-American writers. These include the oral tradition in Afro-American culture and essential cultural elements such as the blues and local peculiarities (blues geography). African American writers and intellectuals with whom he was particularly concerned include Frederick Douglass , WEB Du Bois , Booker T. Washington , Richard Wright , Ralph Ellison . He also uses methods of deconstruction .

He was president of the Modern Language Association and editor of American Literature . He was a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His book Betrayal received the American Book Award in 2009. In 2020, Baker was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Baker also published volumes of poetry.

Fonts (selection)

• Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture, University of Virginia Press 1972
• Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature, Howard University Press 1974
• On the Criticism of Black Literature: One View of the Black Aesthetic, in Baker (Ed.), Reading Black, Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean and Black American Literature, Cornell University Press, 1976, pp. 48-58.
• The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
• Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing. University of Chicago Press, 1991
• Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism / Re-Reading Booker T. Duke University Press, 2001.
• Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing and Black Fathers and Sons in America, University of Georgia Press 2001
• I Don't hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South, Oxford UP 2007
• Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era, 2009.
• Editor with Merinda Simmons: The Trouble with Post-Blackness Columbia University Press, 2015.

Web links

• Website at Vanderbilt University
• Old website at Vanderbilt University (web archive)
• Biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica