Houston A. Baker Jr.

Houston Alfred Baker Jr. (born March 22, 1943), an American scholar specializing in African-American literature, is Professor Emeritus Distinguished University Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Baker served as president of the Modern Language Association and editor of the journal American Literature, along with authoring several books, including The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), and Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing (1993), and editing literary collections. Baker was included in the 2006 textbook Fifty Key Literary Theorists, by Richard J. Lane. The racism and violence he claims to have experienced as a youth would later prompt him to conclude: "I had been discriminated against and called 'Nigger' enough to think that what America needed was a good Black Revolution."

Literary scholarship

Baker's work in African-American literary studies has been called "groundbreaking" for his ability to connect theory about the texts with the historical conditions of the beginning of the African-American community, namely, both their uprooting from Africa and their ability to maintain their African heritage through an emphasis on spirituality and on autobiography, which allowed them to "reinforce and reinvent self-worth in the midst of their debasement".

2006 Duke University lacrosse case During the 2006 Duke University lacrosse case, Baker published an open letter calling for Duke to dismiss the team and its players. Baker claimed that "white, male, athletic privilege" was responsible for the alleged rape. Baker suggested that the Duke administration was "sweeping things under the rug".

Following the exoneration of the players, one of the parents of a Duke lacrosse player emailed Baker and reported that he responded by writing that, despite exoneration, and Mangums' arrest, she was "quite sadly, mother of a 'farm animal.

Works Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. Singers of Daybreak: Studies in Black American Literature, Washington: Howard University Press, 1974. A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen, Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974. (With Charlotte Pierce-Baker), Renewal: A Volume of Black Poems, Philadelphia: Afro-American Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, 1977. No Matter Where You Travel, You Still Be Black (Poems), Detroit: Lotus Press, 1979. The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism. University of Chicago Press, 1980. Spirit Run (poems), Detroit: Lotus Press, 1982. 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, 1993. 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. Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Right Era (American Book Award), 2009. The Trouble with Post-Blackness Columbia University Press, 2015.

As editor Black Literature in America, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Native Son, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Reading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University (Africana Studies and Research Center Monograph Series, no. 4), 1976. A Dark and Sudden Beauty: Two Essays in Black American Poetry by George Kent and Stephen Henderson, Philadelphia: Afro-American Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, 1977. (With Leslie Fiedler) English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian American Literature for Teachers of American Literature, New York: Modern Language Association of American, 1982; paper edition from MLA, 1983. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An Americana Slave, New York: Penguin, 1982; Ebook 2013. (With Patricia Redmond) Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Unsettling Blackness, Special Issue of American Literature devoted to Afro-American Literary Studies, 2000. (With Dana Nelson) Violence, the Body, and the South, Special Issue of American Literature, 2001. Erasing the Commas: RaceGenderClassSexualityRegion, Special Issue of American Literature (March, 2005). The Trouble with Post-Blackness, Columbia University Press, 2015.