Houston A. Baker

Discusses Walker, Douglass, Booker T. Washington's Up from slavery, W.E.B. du Bois' The souls of Black folk, Richard Wright's Native son, and more.

In this explosive book, Houston Baker takes stock of the current state of Black Studies in the university and outlines its responsibilities to the newest form of black urban expression--rap. A frank, polemical essay, Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy is an uninhibited defense of Black Studies and an extended commentary on the importance of rap. Written in the midst of the political correctness wars and in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Baker's meditation on the academy and black urban expression has generated much controversy and comment from both ends of the political spectrum.

Featuring the work of the most distinguished scholars in the field, this volume assesses the state of Afro-American literary study and projects a vision of that study for the 1990s.

"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.""--BOOK JACKET.

"This well-chosen selection contributes to our understanding of the psychological and cultural complexities of these minority groups and helps us, as Baker suggests, 'arrive at a [more] just assessment of the distinctive character of American social and intellectual history.'"--World Literature Today.

Summary:Offers an account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. This book 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 centre of the African-American experience.

"Post-Blackness salutes Black individuals and their achievements while rejecting affiliation with any larger Black community. It disavows allegiance to Black intellectual and cultural traditions. Its stance depends on the premise that the current racial order has broken with the past. This collection of commissioned essays begins a long overdue discussion about changes in the racial order in the age of Obama. It interrogates and challenges the emergence of post-Black ideology from a variety of perspectives. It examines how we pay attention to the ways in which Blackness has been patterned and imagined in America. Making use of a wide scope of topics that rally around central questions introduced by the notion of post-Blackness, the volume gives general readers and students an introduction to what it means to be 'Black' in the twenty-first century"--Provided by publisher.

Essays to help you understand and appreciate Wright's novel, Native son.