26



B

Baker, Houston A., Jr. (1943– )
Born and raised in “racist, stultifying” Louisville,
Kentucky, Houston Baker is one of the preemi-
nent scholars and critical theorists of African-
American literature in the United States today.
Over the course of his career, Baker has published
numerous theoretical works, scores of scholarly
essays, and several works of poetry and edited
scholarly collections, including his anthology
Black Literature in America (1971). He served as
the first black president of the Modern Language
Association of America. He has held teaching ap-
pointments at numerous prestigious universities,
including Yale (1968–1970), University of Virginia
(1970–1974), University of Pennsylvania (1974–
1998), and Duke University (1998–present). He
received his B.A. from Howard University in 1965
and his Ph.D. from the University of California at
Los Angeles in 1968.
In his poetry, Baker presents the Louisville of
his childhood as a socially complicated site where,
on the one hand, economic decline and white
racism led to intense feelings of “hatred, bitter-
ness, longing.” On the other hand, the same site
was significant because it provided Baker with a
real sense of communality with his predecessors.
Baker writes in “This Is Not a Poem,” “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.” The constant pull

between the hatred of racism and appreciation of

communality rooted in a specific location is char-

acteristic of Baker’s critical output.

Whereas his dissertation and first publications

focused on Victorian poetry, throughout the ma-

jority of his career Baker’s work has been cen-

trally concerned with theoretical paradigms for

studying vernacular literatures. Baker argues that

canons that are built not on conventional works

of high literary and cultural value but written in

what he calls “standard” language require their

own individuated modes of criticism. The study of

African-American literature, he concludes, needs

to follow principles rooted in African-American

aesthetic experience. The BLUES, then, and specifi-

cally blues musicians like Robert Johnson “at the

crossroads,” become generative figures for mak-

ing meaning out of African-American art. When

combined with the philosophical, social, and

linguistic considerations of “high” theorists like

G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx and of contempo-

raries like Jacques Derrida and Fredric Jameson,

Baker’s approach puts the sociocultural signifi-

cance of the art into dialogue with works written

in “standard” languages. As Baker states in one

of his seminal works, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-

American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984),

“Afro-American culture is a complex, reflexive

enterprise which finds its proper figuration in