Baker, Houston A., Jr.

in full Houston Alfred Baker, Jr.

(born March 22, 1943, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.) African-American educator and critic who proposed new standards, based on African-American culture and values, for the interpretation and evaluation of literature.

Baker attended Howard University (B.A, 1965), the University of Edinburgh, and the University of California at Los Angeles (M.A., 1966; Ph.D., 1968) and taught at Yale and Cornell universities, Haverford College, and the University of Virginia. From 1974 to 1977 he directed the Afro-American studies program at the University of Pennsylvania. Besides editing collections of poetry and essays, he wrote the studies Long Black Song (1972), Singers of Daybreak (1974), The Journey Back (1980), and Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987). In Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984), he discussed the musical idiom both as a synthesis of traditional and modern black responses to life and as a vernacular paradigm for American culture as a whole.

The works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison figure prominently in Baker's studies because of the wide canvas upon which they display the vitality of black culture and its struggle for communication. The breadth of his concerns is indicated by his familiarity with early black writers, including Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, and David Walker, with critical methods such as semiotics and deconstruction, and with the historical, social, political, and economic elements of African-American culture.