Houston A Baker

Houston A. Baker Jr. condemns those black intellectuals who, he believes, have turned their backs on the tradition of racial activism in America. These individuals choose personal gain over the interests of the black majority, whether they are espousing neoconservative positions that distort the contours of contemporary social and political dynamics or abandoning race as an important issue in the study of American literature and culture. Most important,...

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...

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.

Discusses Walker, Douglass, Booker T. Washington's Up from slavery, W.E.B. du Bois' The souls of Black folk, Richard Wright's Native son, and more.

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.

"An updated edition of a classic African American autobiography, with new supplementary materials. The preeminent American slave narrative first published in 1845, Frederick Douglass's Narrative powerfully details the life of the abolitionist from his birth into slavery to his escape to the North in 1838. Douglass tells how he endured the daily physical and spiritual brutalities of his owners and drivers, how he learned to read and write, and how...

Essays to help you understand and appreciate Wright's novel, Native son.

Featuring the work of some of the field's most distinguished scholars, this volume assesses the state of African American literary study and projects a vision of that study into the 1990s.