Critical Memory

Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America

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by Houston A. Baker

University of Georgia Press

Due/Published March 2001, 75 pages, cloth

ISBN 0820322407

From the lone outcry of Richard Wright's Black Boy to the chorusing voices of Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March, Critical Memory looks across the past half century to assess the current challenges to African American cultural and intellectual life. As Houston A. Baker recalls his own youth in Louisville, Kentucky, and Washington, D.C., he situates such figures as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Shelby Steele, O.J. Simpson, Chris Rock, and Jesse Jackson within such issues as the embattled state of African American manhood and the "financing and promotion of black intellectuals."

Review

This is vital, provocative, and inspired writing from one of the leading intellectuals in the United States. The essays included in Critical Memory were originally given as lectures at Georgia Southern University in 1997 and combine literary criticism, personal recollections from Baker’s childhood, social observation, and a powerful call for intellectual responsibility. The overarching theme in these lectures is the issue of race, how it has been explored in the writings of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, and how it must be confronted today. In the opening essay, “Black Modernity: Kitchen Memories, Likable Black Boys, and the American South,” Baker praises Richard Wright for his incisive and courageous analysis of white racism in the United States. Wright’s work and political positions assured disdain from the white establishment but they also represent a lasting critique of racism and strongly affirm that the intellectual can play an important role in public life. In the second essay, “Failed Memory: Black Majority Modernism and Mr. Ellison’s Invisible Man,” Baker argues that Ralph Ellison, whose only novel gained immediate acceptance in white America, failed to grasp the ideological and economic nature of racism in the United States. Baker also examines the successes, failures, meanings, and hopes raised by the Million Man March in “Words for Black Fathers and Sons in America: Symbolic Politics and a Million Man March.” Baker addresses memories of his father and his uncles in a perceptive and often moving account of the special relationship between black men of different generations and the struggles all black men must endure in the United States. These memories linger in his examination of the positive ways the Million Man March attempted to recast and reaffirm black masculinity and a sense of community.

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