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Turning South Again
Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.
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by Houston A. Baker
Duke University Press
Due/Published
May 2001, 136 pages,
paper
ISBN
0822326957
Baker offers a revisionist account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. With a different perspective on the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute than that presented in his earlier book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, he combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and whiteness studies to argue that the American South and its regulating institutions--particularly that of incarceration--are at the center of the African-American experience. From the holds of slave ships to the peonage of Reconstruction to the contemporary prison system, incarceration has largely defined black life in the United States. Washington's school at Tuskegee, Baker explains, housed and regulated black bodies no longer directly controlled by slave-owners. He further implicates Washington by claiming that--in enacting his ideas about racial "uplift"--Washington engaged in "mulatto modernism," a compromised attempt at full citizenship. Combining autobiographical prose, literary criticism, psychoanalytic writing, and, occasionally, blues lyrics and poetry, Baker meditates on the consequences of mulatto modernism for the project of black modernism, which he defines as the achievement of mobile, life-enhancing, public sphere participation and economic solvency for the majority of African-Americans. By including a section about growing up in the South and his recent return to assume a professorship at Duke, Baker contributes further to one of the book's central concerns: a call to centralize the South in American cultural studies. "A book by Baker tends to be something of an event in the field--the field being not only African American literature but also cultural studies impinging on Americana. His books have an impact, cause discussion, and provoke debates. This one, however, seems to me unusually well motivated. Personal matters have moved Baker to outdo himself in the sharpness of his observations, the power of his insights, and the vigor of his language."--Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University "Baker offers an original blend of self-reflection, cultural inquiry, social critique, and close textual analysis of a classic book in African American history and literature. This is the most revealing study of Up From Slavery that I've ever seen and the most personal and self-revealing piece of writing that Baker has ever published."--William L. Andrews, author of To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865. |
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Review
Drawing on the history of Booker T. Washington, the Tuskegee Institute, and his own memories growing up as a young black man in the segregated South, Houston Baker reconsiders the meanings, limitations, and the potential of a black modernism. Baker argues that Southern regulating institutions -- particularly incarceration -- have been central to the African American experience. To a certain extent, Baker argues, Washington's Tuskegee Institute housed and regulated black bodies in a manner similar to the institutions of the white South. He also contends that Washington's emphasis on "racial uplift" created a "mulatto modernism" that compromised black attempts at full citizenship and modernity. Baker's original re-reading of Booker T. Washington is framed within the context of the importance of writing and language in the African American experience: it is through stories, folklore, literature, and conversation that African Americans resist racism and create their own subjectivity. Baker's revisionist understanding of Washington and the practice of his own scholarship also are attempts to "liberate black modernism" and establish "an achieved modernism, facilitating a black public sphere assembly and exchange capable of producing focused speaking and life-enhancing change for the black majority." In order to do this, Baker also suggests, discussions about U.S. history and history should place greater emphasis on the South. Turning South Again is a remarkable cultural, social, and historical critique that provides a vital reinterpretation of Up From Slavery and the fate of black modernism in the twenty-first century. It is also one of those rare works that displays impressive scholarship, personal reflection, and social awareness in a unified fashion. Also of interest is the recent collection of Baker's lectures, Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America For titles in related subjects: |
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