|
Books by Houston Baker, Jr.
Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader
/
Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s /
Black Studies, Rap and the Academy
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
/
Workings of the Sprit:
The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing
Blues, Ideology and
Afro-American Literature
* * * * *
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
By Houston A. Baker
Reviews & Excerpts
Commentary by Rudolph Lewis
Reviews
Mr. Baker perceives the Harlem Renaissance as a crucial moment
in a movement, predating the 1920s, when Afro-Americans embraced
the task of self-determination and in so doing gave forth a
distinctive form of expression that still echoes in a broad
spectrum of 20th-century Afro-American arts. . . . .
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
may well become Afro-America's 'studying manual'.
Tonya Bolden Davis,
New York Times Book Review
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance is a stunningly original book. opposing the view of
earlier critics, such as Nathan Huggins, that the Harlem
Renaissance was a failure. professor Baker redefines modernism
and establishes a case for a distinctly Afro-American version of
that movement. . . . Rejecting the limitations of a
traditionalist approach to modernism, Baker proposes the
concepts of 'mastery of form' and 'deformation of mastery' as
more suitable strategies for the interpretation of Afro-American
discourse.
Faith Pullin,
Times Higher Education Supplement
A truly brilliant work. in it,
Houston baker has found his voice, his own blue-black critical
voice, a voice free of other white, Western critical voices and
their language of post-structural jargon(s). It is entirely
appropriate that black music, and soundings, are Baker's
central, and repeated and unifying metaphors, for this book's
true subject is in what voice shall the black critic 'speak'.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Cornell
University
* * * *
*
Excerpts
Defining Form
For the present, I shall use
the term "form" to signal a symbolizing fluidity. I intend by
the term a family of concepts or a momentary and changing same
array of images, figures, assumptions, and presuppositions that
a group of people (even one as extensive and populous as a
nation) holds to be a valued repository of spirit. And the form
most apt for carrying forward such notions is a mask.
It is difficult to convey
notions of form and mask in the exact ways that I
would like, for the mask as form does not exist as a static
object. rather it takes effect as a center for ritual and can
only be defined—like
form—from
the perspective of action, motion seen rather than
"thing" observed. I shall make an attempt to convey the notion
of mask as form, however, by summoning a familiar imagistic
array, a long-standing group of concepts and assumptions that
serves as a spiritual repository for a quintessential American
ritual. The form, array, mask that I have in mind is the
minstrel mask.
That mask is a space of
habitation not only for repressed spirits of sexuality, ludic
play, id satisfaction, castration anxiety, and a mirror stage of
development, but also for that deep-seated denial of the
indisputable humanity of inhabitants of and descendants from the
continent of Africa. And it is, first and foremost, the mastery
of the minstrel mask by blacks that constitutes a primary move
in Afro-American discursive modernism.
The spirit of denial in the
minstrel mask is nowhere more defining of a national spirit than
in the united states. the mask, for generations on end, has been
so persuasively captivating, so effectively engaging in its
seeming authenticity, that an astute intellectual like Constance
Rourke can actually take it as an adequate and accurate sign of
a 'tradition" of "negro literature' predating the 'cult" of
Afro-American expressivity she found so wearying in the 1940s. (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance)
* * *
* *
The Roots of American Culture and
Other Essays
(1942)
By Constance Rourke
| "Traditions for a Negro Literature"
Early blackface
minstrelsy revealed indeed the natural
appropriations of the Negro from the life about him:
but the persistent stress was primitive, the effect
exotic, and strange with the swaying figures and
black faces of the minstrels lighted by guttering
gas flames or candlelight on small country stages or
even in the larger theaters. Within this large and
various pattern lay a fresh context of comedy, plain
in the intricate, grotesque dancing as the minstrels
"walked jaw-bone" or accomplished the deep
complications of the "dubble trubble" or the
"grapevine twist." A bold comic quality appeared
which had not developed elsewhere in American humor,
that of nonsense.
With all his
comic wild excesses the backwoodsman never
overflowed into pure nonsense; the Yankee did not
display it. Perhaps the negro did not invent the
nonsensical narratives told in song on the minstrel
stage, but the touch is akin to that of Negro fables
in song; and nonsense in minstrelsy shows a sharp
distinction from other humor of the day.
A little old man
was ridin' by,
His horse was tryin'
to kick fly,
He lifted his leg
towards de south
An' sent it bang
in its own mouth—
*
* * * *
The note
of triumph, dominant in all early American humor,
appeared in these reflected creations of the Negro,
but not as triumph over circumstance. Rather this
was an unreasonably headlong triumph launching into
the realm of the preposterous.
Constance Rourke,
The Roots of American Culture and
Other Essays
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), pp.269-270.
*
* * * *
*Note also the
passages on "nonsense" in the 3rd chapter of
Rourke's American Humor,
Rourke, Ch 03: "
And a far
bolder comic quality appeared which had hardly
developed elsewhere in the American comic
display-that of nonsense. . . . Strangely
enough, with all his wild excess the backwoodsman
never overflowed into pure nonsense. Perhaps the
Negro did not invent the nonsensical
narratives which appeared in his dialect, but the
touch is akin to that in many of the Negro fables in
song. Certainly nonsense in minstrelsy shows
a sharp distinction from other humor of the day. The
minstrel mode went off to a bold and careless
tangent. . . .
The sudden
extreme of nonsense was new, and the tragic
undertone was new. . . . A minstrel song, Foster's
"Oh, Susannah!" became a rallying-cry for the new
empire, a song of meeting and parting turned to
nonsense, a fiddler's tune with a Negro beat and
a touch of smothered pathos in the melody. Fragments
of familiar reels and breakdowns, of boatmen's
dances and boatmen's songs, were often caught within
the minstrel pattern: much of the pioneer experience
was embedded there. No doubt the appeal of
minstrelsy came from these draughts upon a common
reminiscence, stirring some essential wish or
remembrance.
Minstrelsy kept
its Negro backgrounds until after the Civil War:
then, if the Negro was set free, in a fashion his
white impersonators were also liberated. Along with
later blackface acting came a strong infusion of
Irish melodies and an Irish brogue. German songs
were sometimes sung on the minstrel stage; and much
later the Jew occasionally emerged in blackface.
Again in fantasy the American types seemed to be
joining in a single semblance. But Negro music and
Negro nonsense still prevailed; through years
the old pattern was kept. The young American
Narcissus had looked at himself in the narrow rocky
pools of New England and by the waters of the
Mississippi; he also gazed long at a darker image.
--Rourke,
Ch 03 |
*
* * * *
Excerpts
Workings of the Minstrel Mask
The minstrel mask is a
governing object in a ritual of non-sense. The brand of
non-sense to which minstrelsy gives force is best described, I
think, by Susan Stewart's observations on "ready made systems"
of nonsense. She writes
|
At times nonsense will effect a traversal that
depends upon the availability of a given, or
ready-made, system from common snense. the
common-sense system provides the closed form within
which nonsense effects its rearrangements or
substitution of elements. One such use of the play
of rearrangements within closed fields is the
mnemonic device.
Here a structure is used to
incorporate all the elements of what is desired to
be remembered. For example, there is the mnemonic
for the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo, and violet), "Roy G. Biv,"
which appears in Ulysses, and another mnemonic for
the same elements, "Read Over Your Greek Books in
Vacation."
The mnemonic is knowledge centered in itself; it
has no meaning outside of its use. it is purely "a
device," for it does not "count" on its own.
Susan Stewart,
Nonsense: Aspects of
Intertexuality in Folklore and Literature
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978),
pp. 186-187 |
By misappropriating elements
from everyday black use, from the vernacular—the
commonplace and commonly sensible in Afro-American life—and
fashioning them into a comic array, a mask of selective memory,
white America fashioned a device that only "counts" in
relationship to the Afro-American systems of sense from which it
is appropriated.
The intensity of the minstrel
ritual, its frantic replaying to packed and jovial houses, is a
function of the "real" Afro-Americans just beyond the theater's
doors, beyond the guttering lights of the mind's eye. The device
is designed to remind white consciousness that black men and
women are mis-speakers bereft of humanity—carefree
devils strumming and humming all day—unless,
in a gaslight misidentification, they are violent devils fit for
lynching, a final exorcism that will leave whites alone. (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,
21)
Which all returns us to
the "mastery of form." For it was in fact the minstrel mask as
mnemonic ritual object that constituted the form that any
Afro-American who desired to be articulate—to
speak at all—had
to master during the age of Booker T. Washington.
I have suggested that the
sound emanating from the mask reverberates through a white
American discursive universe as the sound of the Negro. if it is
true that myth is the detritus of ritual, then the most clearly
identifiable atavistic remains of minstrelsy are narratives or
stories of ignorant and pathetically comic brutes who speak
nonsense syllables. . . .
These sounds are implicit in in
the haughty eyeball-rollers of Gatsby and gather strength in the
murmurings of Faulkner's Clytie and Dilsey. they are ritually
renewed by Amos and Andy and appear today with mythic and
mnemonic force in television's Mr. T, George Jefferson, and tiny
Arnold. Obviously, an Afro-American spokesperson who wished to
engage in a masterful and empowering play within the minstrel
spirit house needed the uncanny ability to manipulate bizarre
phonic legacies. For he or she had the task of transforming the
mask and its sounds into negotiable discursive currency. In
effect, the task was the production of a manual of black
speaking, a book of speaking back and black. (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,
21-24)
* * *
* *
Excerpts
Thirty-two years after the
Emancipation Proclamation [1865], Booker T. Washington changed
the minstrel joke by stepping inside the white world's nonsense
syllables with oratorical mastery.
Up from Slavery
[1901] offers a
record and representation of Afro-America's mastery of form.
early in the text we discover that Washington understands the
constraints that define Afro-American sound:
|
As the great day [of
emancipation] drew nearer, there was more singing in
the slave quarters than usual. it was bolder, had
more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of
the verses of the plantation songs had some
reference to freedom. True, they had sung those same
verses before, but they had been careful to explain
that the "freedom" in those songs referred to the
next world. Now, they gradually threw off the
mask; and were not afraid to let it be known
that the 'freedom" in their songs meant freedom of
the body in this world. [p. 39, my emphasis] |
Playing behind a pious mask is
as central to the narrator's characterization of black quarters
as the renaming that he describes: "in some way a feeling got
among the coloured people that it was far from proper for them
to bear the surnames of their former owners, and a great many of
them took other surnames" (p. 41).
A liberating manipulation of
masks and a revolutionary renaming are not features
commonly ascribed to the efforts of Booker T. Washington.
* * *
* *
Excerpts
Like
Billy Kersands stretching the minstrel face to a successful
black excess, or
Bert Williams and George Walker converting
nonsense sounds and awkwardly demeaning minstrel steps into pure kinesthetics and masterful black artistry, so Washington takes
up types and tones of
nonsense to earn a national
reputation and its corollary
benefits for the
Afro-American masses.
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,
Chapter 4.
* * *
* *
Excerpts
Washington v. Dunbar
To designate
Washington rather than,
say, Paul Lawrence Dunbar as
the quintessential herald of
modernism in black
expressive culture is not
willful revisionism. For I
am interested in a mastery
of form that renders it more
than a strategy adopted for
the aesthetic satisfaction
of the individual artist. .
. . Washington is 'modern'
in my view, then, because he
earnestly projected the
flourishing of a southern,
black Eden at Tuskegee—a New
World garden to nurture
hands, heads, and hearts of
a younger generation of
agrarian black folk in the
'country districts'.
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,
Chapter 5.
* * *
* *
Excerpts Deformation of
Mastery—African
Mask
The deformation of mastery refuses a master's nonsense. It
returns—often transmuting 'standard' syllables—to the common
sense of the tribe. Its relationship to masks is radically
different from that of the mastery of form. The spirit house
occupying the deformer is not minstrelsy, but the sound and
space of an African ancestral past. For the Afro-American
spokesperson, the most engaging repository for deformation's
sounding work is the fluid and multiform mask of African
ancestry. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the most
articulate adherent of African sound was W.E.B. Du Bois.
The
Souls of Black Folk announces in its very title that an
'other world' nonsense will not be countenanced. A nation, a
FOLK manifold in spirit (note plurality of 'soul' captured by
its s), will be the subject of the black spokesperson's
narrative. Afro-American songs appropriately called 'spirituals'
provide sound for a ritual that begins with the title. The whole
of
Souls
moves in fact
toward the moment in chapter fourteen when the text becomes a
sounding score—when the phaneric narrator [go(ue)rilla] reveals
that he knows the score where lordship and deformity are
concerned.
"The governing
metaphor of
Souls is the 'Veil'.
The Veil signifies a barrier of American racial segregation that
keeps Afro-Americans always behind a color line—disoriented—prey
to divided aims, dire economic circumstances, haphazard
educational opportunities, and frustrated intellectual
ambitions. In the penultimate vision of
Souls that occurs in
chapter fourteen, this Veil is rent. . . . The Duboisean
voice ceaselessly invokes ancestral spirits and ancient formulas
that move toward an act of cultural triumph. In fact, I defines
the Afro-American spiritual as synonymous with the African mask
here because Du Bois's narrator seems so patently self conscious
in the repeated use of 'Sorrow Songs' or spirituals as masterful
repositories of an African cultural spirit. (Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance,
Chapter
7) *
* * * *
Editorial Commentary
Afro-American
modernism was inaugurated in terms of artistic development:
the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery.
The major artistic representation of the Negro took the form (in
speech and body motion) on stage in black-face minstrelsy or in
literature as in the character Topsy in Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin, appearing first in the 1840s and 1850s.
Minstrelsy negates the Negro or erases his humanity in terms of
nonsense.
In
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
(1987), Baker asserts that Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery and Charles Chestnutt's
Conjure Woman
represent Afro-American mastery of minstrelsy or the minstrel
mask, that is, they stand the form on its head (in a sense, they
step inside of the nonsense) and make use of the form for
purposes for which it was never intended, that is, to serve the
greater interest of the Negro people. In their expert hands
nonsense gains focus, purpose, and direction.
Maybe Baker is unfair in his characterization of Booker T.
Washington, as a black black-faced minstrel. But it seems quite
clear that Washington and Chestnutt were both aware of
minstrelsy and that both made use of (alluded to) it in their literary
productions. It's also clear that Dunbar was uneasy in
his productions of dialect verse and preferred to write in
standard English. Even so, "When Malindy Sings" is one of the
finest English poems ever written.
In reading Ronald W. Walters'
White Nationalism, Black Interests and
Houston A. Baker's
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
(1987), one cannot but wonder whether there are parallels
between the post-Reconstruction era of the 19th century
(viewed by Walters) and the turn of the century Washington-DuBois-Alain
Locke era (viewed by Baker), and the more recent
Reagan-Clinton-Bush era that we now find ourselves.
In the former era, the Negro redefined himself, began to
speak for himself on a national basis and entered that era,
Baker calls it Afro-American "modernism," which he believes
were more fully spoken in Alain Locke's The New Negro.
In 2006, , the post-modern era, the Negro as
African-American is again trying to lay (prepare) the field
for a new generation to move the nation forward to fulfill
its promise to all of its citizens, especially for those who
carry most the burdens of the nation's misdeeds.
Locke closed the introduction of
The New Negro with words that seem just as
appropriate today:
|
But whatever the general effect, the present
generation will have added the motives of
self-expression and spiritual development to the
old and still unfinished task of making material
headway and progress. No one who understandingly
faces the situation with its substantial
accomplishment or views the new scene with its
still more abundant promise can be entirely
without hope." |
* * * *
*
Houston Baker—has taught at Yale, the University of Virginia, and the
University of Pennsylvania. He joined the Duke English
Department faculty in 1999. Commencing his career as a
scholar of British Victorian literature, he made a
career shift to the study and scholarship of
Afro-American Literature and Culture during the early
1970s. He is the author of articles, essays, and reviews
in Victorian, American, and Afro-American literatures
and cultures. He has authored a number of critical and
scholarly books and studies of Afro-American literature
and culture, including:
Blues, Ideology and
Afro-American Literature;
Workings of the Sprit:
The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing;
Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance;
Black Studies, Rap and the Academy.
He has held
visiting posts and presented visiting lectures at a
number of universities in the United States and abroad.
In 1992, he served as President of the Modern Language
Association, the most influential learned society in the
humanities. He is currently Editor of the journal
American Literature, founded at Duke in 1929, and edited
a Special Issue entitled "Unsettling Blackness." His
current projects include: a study of Afro- Modernism and
the legacy of Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee
Institute; a memoir in progress; a book devoted to
modernism and the responsibilities of black
intellectuals in the United States. His most recent
books include: Critical Memory (University of
Georgia Press) and
Turning South Again: Rethinking
Modernism/Rereading Booker T. (Duke University), and
a volume of poetry titled Passing Over.
posted 23 September 2006
* * * *
*
Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of
the Civil Rights Era
Reviewing Houston A. Baker's
Betrayal
of Black Intellectuals
Robert J. Norrell.
Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington
Illustrated. 508 pp. The
Belknap Press / Harvard University Press.
* * * *
*
* * *
* *
Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
* *
* * *
|
|
Lynchsong
By Lorraine Hansberry
I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes
The
faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night
1951
Source:
AmericanLynching |
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
 |
Writer Lorraine Hansberry's
sober eulogy of the death of Willie McGee weighed heavy on the
hearts and minds of the American Left. On May 8, 1951, a crowd of
five hundred lingered outside the courthouse of Laurel, Mississippi,
to witness the execution of yet another black man convicted for
allegedly raping a white woman. His 1945 lightning trial resulted in
a guilty conviction delivered in less than two and a half minutes by
an all-white, male jury, setting off a heated five-year legal
struggle that drew national headlines. Despite an aggressive appeals
defense team who attempted every legal maneuver in the book, the US
Supreme Court ultimately chose not to intervene. With the legal
lynching of the Martinsville Seven in February, Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg's conviction in March, followed by the execution of McGee
in May, 1951 was a bad year for Left-leaning lawyers (Parrish 1979;
Rise 1995). Most discouraging, national news sources like the New
York Times and Life magazine red-baited the "Save Willie
McGee" campaign and—as Life reported—its "imported" lawyers (Popham
1951a; Life 1951). Few felt McGee's passing with as heavy a heart as
his chief counsel, thirty-one-year-old Bella Abzug. |
Before Abzug became a representative in
Congress and a leader in the peace and women's movements, she confronted the
Southern political and legal system at the height of the early Cold War.
Retained in 1948 by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)—a New York-headquartered
Popular Front legal defense organization—the novice labor lawyer honed her civil
rights . . .
Source:
https://Litigation-Essentials.LexisNexis
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
|
The Eyes of Willie McGee
A
Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim
Crow South
By
Alex Heard
An
iconic criminal case—a black man sentenced
to death for raping a white woman in
Mississippi in 1945—exposes the roiling
tensions of the early civil rights era in
this provocative study. McGee's prosecution
garnered international protests—he was
championed by the Communist Party and
defended by a young lawyer named Bella Abzug
(later a New York City congresswoman and
cofounder of the National Women's Political
Caucus), while luminaries from William
Faulkner to Albert Einstein spoke out for
him—but journalist Heard (Apocalypse Pretty
Soon) finds the saga rife with enigmas. The
case against McGee, hinging on a possibly
coerced confession, was weak and the legal
proceedings marred by racial bias and
intimidation. (During one of his trials, his
lawyers fled for their lives without
delivering summations.) But Heard contends
that McGee's story—that he and the victim,
Willette Hawkins, were having an affair—is
equally shaky. The author's extensive
research delves into the documentation of
the case, the public debate surrounding it,
and the recollections of McGee and Hawkins's
family members. Heard finds no easy answers,
but his nuanced, evocative portrait of the
passions enveloping McGee's case is plenty
revealing.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * *
* *
 |
Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban Nicolás Guillén
and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
|
*
* * * *
|
Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In
Greenback Planet,
acclaimed historian H. W. Brands
charts the dollar's astonishing
rise to become the world's
principal currency. Telling the
story with the verve of a
novelist, he recounts key
episodes in U.S. monetary
history, from the Civil War
debate over fiat money
(greenbacks) to the recent
worldwide financial crisis.
Brands explores the dollar's
changing relations to gold and
silver and to other currencies
and cogently explains how
America's economic might made
the dollar the fundamental
standard of value in world
finance. He vividly describes
the 1869 Black Friday attempt to
corner the gold market, banker
J. P. Morgan's bailout of the
U.S. treasury, the creation of
the Federal Reserve, and
President Franklin Roosevelt's
handling of the bank panic of
1933. Brands shows how lessons
learned (and not learned) in the
Great Depression have influenced
subsequent U.S. monetary policy,
and how the dollar's dominance
helped transform economies in
countries ranging from Germany
and Japan after World War II to
Russia and China today.
The Economy |
 |
* * * *
*
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By
W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/ January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
|
