Houston A. Baker, Jr. 1943–

Scholar, educator, literary critic, writer

Advocated Black Power as a Young Scholar

Widespread Acclaim and Institutional Affirmation

As president of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), the professional association of teachers and scholars of language and culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr., had achieved in 1992 a height in his career which might prove difficult for him to surpass in the future. Just one year earlier, Baker had completed his trilogy on Afro-American “spirit work,” or expressive culture, with the publication of Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing, an analysis of the contributions of Afro-American women writers to black intellectual history. The author’s broad investigation began with a study of mostly male writers in the Harlem Renaissance in his first of the three volumes, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, and continued in his second, Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, with a more autobiographical account of a shifting Afro-American theory of artistic value. While arguably his most stunning achievement, this trilogy is only Baker’s most recent accomplishment in a long series of major contributions to both scholarship and education.

Baker was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. The racism he experienced in his youth explains his eventual championing of Black Power, a movement of black nationalist pride to bring about a black revolution in the late sixties and early seventies. He wrote in Afro-American Poetics: “Having grown up in a racist, stultifying Louisville, Kentucky—which, on any given day, could make 1987 Cumming, Georgia, look like Club Med—I had been discriminated against and called ‘Nigger’ enough to think that what America needed was a good Black Revolution.”

Cumming, Georgia, was the site of a mass demonstration in 1987. Civil rights leaders organized some 15,000 to 20,000 people in a march to protest racism there. They found themselves opposed by over 1,000 counter-demonstrators, with an additional 1,700 Georgia National Guardsmen and 500 Georgia state troopers present. Baker’s opposition to the more explicit and epidemic racist violence of his youth—specifically those white officers back in Kentucky “who carried guns, wore uniforms, and had the authority to shatter my life with a word or bullet”—led him to identify with black revolutionary ideology. The armed, militant resistance of the Black Panthers seemed liberating to him at that time. From his perspective years later in 1988, though, Baker expressed ambivalence regarding his earlier years as a Black Power advocate. However, even in these later reflections in Afro-American Poetics, he still affirms, to some degree, the utility of Black Power as a response to white racism.

At a Glance…

Born Houston Alfred Baker, Jr., March 22, 1943, in Louisville, KY; son of Houston A. and Viola Elizabeth (Smith) Baker; married Charlotte Marie Pierce (an educator), September 10, 1966; children: Mark Frederick. Education: Howard University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1965; University of California, Los Angeles, M.A. (John Hay Whitney fellow), 1966, Ph.D., 1968; graduate study at University of Edinburgh, 1967-68.

Howard University, Washington, DC, instructor in English, summer 1966; Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor, 1968-69, assistant professor of English, 1969-70; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, associate professor, 1970-73, professor of English, 1973-74; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, director of Afro-American Studies Program, 1974-77, professor of English, 1974-82, Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations, 1982—, director of Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, 1987—. Distinguished visiting scholar/visiting professor at various institutions. Member, Fulbright-Hays literature screening committee, 1973-74, and Committee on Scholarly Worth, Howard University Press, 1973—.

Awards: Alfred Longueil Poetry Award from UCLA, 1966; Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellow, 1977-78; Guggenheim fellow, 1978-79; National Humanities Center fellow, 1982-83; Rockefeller Minority Group fellow, 1982-83; honorary degrees from Berea and Williams colleges.

Member: Modern Language Association of America (president, 1992); College Language Association; American Studies Association; Phi Beta Kappa; Kappa Delta Pi.

Addresses: Office —Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104.

But Baker’s memories of his youth in Kentucky were filled with much more than visions of white racism. In a brief autobiographical note in Blues Journeys Home, his 1985 book of poems, Baker remembers that he grew to harbor feelings of “hatred, bitterness, longing, and something else.…” Some years later in 1982, while living in the South once again, he discovered that “something else” to be a “dreadful love.” In “This Is Not a Poem,” from Blues Journeys Home, Baker expresses an appreciation for roots and kin while acknowledging the difficulty of his ancestors’ lives. After recalling the hardships endured by generations past, the poem’s speaker addresses the reader directly: “Had you been there while I was growing up, or / Even in the thin/worn time of their decline, / I would have introduced you. / Allowed you to share the fine goodness of ancestral / Caring.”

Within that southern environment, the speaker offers “to share the fine goodness of ancestral/ Caring” with the reader. But while Baker portrays a warm communality in these lines, he still does not paint an entirely nostalgic portrait. The time is still “thin/worn” and one of his forebears’ “decline.” The story of each ancestor in the poem depicts a struggle for dignity in the midst of hard times, menial labor, and white racism. According to some critics, this image of a community embroiled in a wearying struggle yet still communally supportive captures Baker’s own ambivalence toward the place of his youth.

Baker’s parents provided him with emotional support when he was young. His mother, Viola Elizabeth, was an English teacher who was known to quote English poet Alfred Tennyson around the house, while his father, Houston A. Baker, Sr., had earned a master’s of business administration from the University of Pennsylvania in 1938. The elder Baker struggled against racist hiring practices but maintained his dignity—and passed that dignity on to his children. Huntly Collins of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Baker’s father offered one particular piece of advice to his son: “Make good grades and be a gentleman.”

Advocated Black Power as a Young Scholar

Baker seems to have taken his father’s advice: he excelled in school and soon became a university teacher and scholar. As one of the few black graduates of Louisville’s predominantly white, male, college-prep high school for academically talented students, Baker went on to earn his bachelor’s degree in English literature from Howard University in Washington, D.C., and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles. As a student at Howard University, Baker studied the then-dominant canon of white male British and American writers. At UCLA, he gained exposure to black literature but still wrote his dissertation on aestheticism in 19th-century British literature. Not until 1968, when Baker held his first teaching position as an English instructor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, did he seriously begin to shift his direction as a scholar from white British literature to black literature.

A Yale Drama School production inspired this shift in interests. Baker explained in Afro-American Poetics that he joined a group of drama school graduate students in their protests of the selection of “some inanely racist play” for production. He also became active in New Haven politics and sought permission to teach a course on black literature during the 1969-70 school year. That same year an editor from McGraw-Hill called with an offer that would set Baker moving in the critical direction he would follow from then on. The editor asked if Baker would be able to compile a comprehensive anthology of black writers. Published in 1971, Black Literature in America was one of the first such anthologies.

Preparing the anthology engaged Baker with the works of a number of writers and altered his critical perspective. Baker found himself at odds with his previous approach to literature, New Criticism. His New Critical concern—for the purely formal aspects of literature as art unto itself—gave way to a Black Aesthetic temperament—centered on the social purpose fulfilled by art. “I came to regard art as both a product and a producer in an unceasing struggle for black liberation. To be ‘art,’ the product had to be expressivity or performance designed to free minds and bodies of a subjugated people,” Baker wrote in Afro-American Poetics.

Virginia, Penn, and Blues Theory

Baker left Yale for an appointment at the University of Virginia in 1970; while at Virginia, he discovered critical challenges to the Black Aesthetic. Along with a number of other black scholars in the early 1970s, he sought a more viable definition of black art.

In 1974, Baker moved to the University of Pennsylvania to direct the school’s Afro-American Studies Program. He began leading efforts, as he described later in Afro-American Poetics, “to formulate an adequate, accurate, and empowering explanatory model for the study of black literature.” Baker organized a symposium with those aims, assembling African, Caribbean, and Afro-American writers for the task. The results of the conference were published in Reading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature in 1976.

Baker completed his move toward a new critical theory in 1983, when he wrote the theoretical work Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, which was published the next year. In this model, the blues represent a fluid, constantly changing synthesis of Afro-American culture. It is a vernacular, or common native language, in that it expresses the ambitions and values of its modern, relatively disempowered, yet emerging contemporaries—African Americans, recent immigrants, backwoodsmen, workers in general. A literary critic who interprets the blues vernacular in literature unravels for readers how the literary art recombines the joys, traditions, ambitions, struggles, fears, and angers—in short the culture—of aspects of the African American vernacular. In his reflections in Afro-American Poetics on his journey from the Black Aesthetic to blues vernacular, Baker found in some of his own poems suggestions of African rhythms and returns to African spiritual/ancestral roots.

Widespread Acclaim and Institutional Affirmation

At the end of Workings of the Spirit, the last of his three books on Afro-American expressive culture, Baker demonstrated his aim in writing the trilogy. In all three books, he poses the question, “Who speaks?” He offers the answer: “Who speaks is, finally, ONE—not (and never again, one thinks) ‘it.’” “One” speaks as opposed to “it” in order to celebrate an achieved victory and to participate in a still ongoing struggle against racist linguistic and cultural subjugation.

Baker’s part in this victory lies in his continued efforts to educate and empower African Americans—to define and voice a selfhood for which formerly colonized peoples collectively have fought. Hence, he writes that “WE can speak as ONE out of an-other and brutalized commonality of ‘it-ness.’” “It-ness” means having been defined as inhuman, as “an-other,” by colonizers in both word and deed.

Some literary critics suggest that Baker’s ultimate goal in his own writings—from his advocacy of the Black Aesthetic through his definition of both the blues vernacular and the poetics of Afro-American women’s writings—has remained essentially unchanged. That goal of claiming African American personhood through the arts has been carried on and achieved throughout the U.S. In the eighties and nineties—a time of phenomenal rise in the popularity of African American women’s writings among diverse segments of the population.

As a scholar of Afro-American literature, an endowed chair professor and a director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, and the 1992 president of the Modern Language Association, Houston A. Baker, Jr., fulfills a much different role today than he did as a Black Power advocate decades ago.

Baker acknowledges that the writings of African American scholars have changed the face of cultural studies within the university setting. He hopes to expand that reach beyond the university through his work with the Center at Penn in a program conceived and directed by his wife, Dr. Charlotte Pierce-Baker. In this program, Dr. Baker arranges meetings between university professors and area public and private high school teachers for knowledge transfer from the university to the high school level. Houston Baker hopes to bridge the gap between university and community, also, by bringing issues of concern to the community into his scholarly work.

During a 1993 interview for African American Review, Baker looked to the future for African American and cultural studies. He pointed to the 1980s as a time in the United States when the divide between rich and poor grew enormously and access to such privileges as higher education narrowed drastically. Baker therefore sees a frightening yet not insurmountable challenge ahead: the entire profession of literary studies, he believes, will have to broaden its territory and become more involved with related efforts—such as literacy training—if it is to maintain current levels of federal funding. He suggests a more active approach to cultural studies, one involving a coalition in the community across ethnicity, race, class, and gender, and perhaps including all those Americans recently displaced by a worsening economy.

Widely regarded as one of the leading black American intellectuals of his time, Houston A. Baker, Jr., continues his labors in the nineties to serve his various communities and to fulfill his lifelong progressive ambitions. A case in point is his 1993 book Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy, which, according to a University of Chicago Press pamphlet, “offers a vigorous commentary on the cultural importance of rap and a passionate argument for the responsibility of intellectuals to this newest form of urban expression.”

Selected writings

(Editor) Black Literature in America, McGraw, 1971.

Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture, University Press of Virginia, 1972.

(Editor) Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Native Son, Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature, Howard University Press, 1974.

A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen, Broadside Press, 1974.

(Editor) Reading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, 1976.

(Editor with wife, Charlotte Pierce-Baker) Renewal: A Volume of Black Poems, Afro-American Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, 1977.

(Editor) A Dark and Sudden Beauty: Two Essays in Black American Poetry by George Kent and Stephen Henderson, Afro-American Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, 1977.

No Matter Where You Travel, You Still Be Black (poems), Lotus Press, 1979.

The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Spirit Run (poems), Lotus Press, 1981.

(Editor with Leslie Fiedler) English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, English Institute, Johns Hopkins University, 1981.

(Editor) Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literature for Teachers of “American” Literature, Modern Language Association of America, 1982.

(Editor and author of introduction) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, Penguin Books, 1982.

Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Blues Journeys Home (poems), Lotus Press, 1985.

(Coauthor) Columbia Literary History of the United States, Columbia University Press, 1987.

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

(With Joe Weixlmann) Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, Penkevill, 1988.

(Editor with Patricia Redmond) Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, University of Chicago Press, 1989.

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.

Contributor of articles and reviews to literature and African American studies journals, including Victorian Poetry, Phylon, Black World, Obsidian, Yale Review, Journal of Afro-American Affairs, Poetics Today, Callaloo, New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Southern Review, Black American Literature Forum, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, and Komparatistische Hefte. Member of advisory board of Maji, 1974-76; Black American Literature Forum, 1976—; and Minority Voices, 1977—.

Sources

Books

Baker, Houston A., Jr., Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

Baker, Houston A., Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Baker, Houston A., Jr., Blues Journeys Home, Lotus Press, 1985.

Baker, Houston A., Jr., Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing, University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Periodicals

African American Review, December 1992, pp. 547-64.

Journal of American History, June 1991.

New York Times Book Review, May 11, 1986; March 22, 1987; October 4, 1987, January 24, 1988, April 2, 1989.

Philadelphia Inquirer, August 22, 1988, p. E1.

Additional information for this profile was obtained from a University of Chicago Press booklet on publications in Black Studies, dated June 1993.

—Nicholas S. Patti

Baker, Houston A. Jr. 1943–

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