Member, Fulbright-Hays literature screening committee, 1973-74, and Committee on Scholarly Worth, Howard University Press, 1973 -.Īwards: Alfred Longueil Poetry Award from UCLA, 1966 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellow, 1977-78 Guggenheim fellow, 1978-79 National Humanities Center fellow, 1982-83 Rockefeller Minority Group fellow, 1982-83 honorary degrees from Berea and Williams colleges. Distinguished visiting scholar/visiting professor at various institutions. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations, 1982 -, director of Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture, 1987. Howard University, Washington, DC, instructor in English, summer 1966 Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor, 1968-69, assistant professor of English, 1969-70 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, associate professor, 1970-73, professor of English, 1973-74 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, director of Afro-American Studies Program, 1974-77, professor of English, 1974-82, Albert M. (John Hay Whitney fellow), 1966, Ph.D., 1968 graduate study at University of Edinburgh, 1967-68. (magna cum laude), 1965 University of California, Los Angeles, M.A. and Viola Elizabeth (Smith) Baker married Charlotte Marie Pierce (an educator), Septemchildren: Mark Frederick. At a Glance …īorn Houston Alfred Baker, Jr., March 22, 1943, in Louisville, KY son of Houston A. However, even in these later reflections in Afro-American Poetics, he still affirms, to some degree, the utility of Black Power as a response to white racism. From his perspective years later in 1988, though, Baker expressed ambivalence regarding his earlier years as a Black Power advocate. The armed, militant resistance of the Black Panthers seemed liberating to him at that time. Baker ’s opposition to the more explicit and epidemic racist violence of his youth -specifically those white officers back in Kentucky “who carried guns, wore uniforms, and had the authority to shatter my life with a word or bullet ” -led him to identify with black revolutionary ideology. They found themselves opposed by over 1,000 counter-demonstrators, with an additional 1,700 Georgia National Guardsmen and 500 Georgia state troopers present. Civil rights leaders organized some 15,000 to 20,000 people in a march to protest racism there. ”Ĭumming, Georgia, was the site of a mass demonstration in 1987. He wrote in Afro-American Poetics: “Having grown up in a racist, stultifying Louisville, Kentucky -which, on any given day, could make 1987 Cumming, Georgia, look like Club Med -I had been discriminated against and called ‘Nigger ’ enough to think that what America needed was a good Black Revolution. The racism he experienced in his youth explains his eventual championing of Black Power, a movement of black nationalist pride to bring about a black revolution in the late sixties and early seventies. While arguably his most stunning achievement, this trilogy is only Baker ’s most recent accomplishment in a long series of major contributions to both scholarship and education.īaker was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. The author ’s broad investigation began with a study of mostly male writers in the Harlem Renaissance in his first of the three volumes, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, and continued in his second, Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic, with a more autobiographical account of a shifting Afro-American theory of artistic value. Just one year earlier, Baker had completed his trilogy on Afro-American “spirit work, ” or expressive culture, with the publication of Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women ’s Writing, an analysis of the contributions of Afro-American women writers to black intellectual history. Baker, Jr., had achieved in 1992 a height in his career which might prove difficult for him to surpass in the future. Widespread Acclaim and Institutional AffirmationĪs president of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA), the professional association of teachers and scholars of language and culture, Houston A. Scholar, educator, literary critic, writer
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