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Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory
Relating the blues to American social and literary history and to Afro-American expressive culture, Houston A. Baker, Jr., offers the basis for a broader study of American culture at its "vernacular" level. He shows how the "blues voice" and its economic undertones are both central to the American narrative and characteristic of the Afro-American way of telling it.
239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
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About the author
Houston A. Baker Jr.
51 books22 followersHouston A. Baker is Distinguished University Professor and a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been a resident fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the National Humanities Center. He has served as president of the Modern Language Association and as editor of the journal American Literature.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 31, 2014
A. Vernacular: The slave meaning is a slave born on his master’s estate. The arts meaning is something particular to a certain part of the country. In this book it means that black literature is not a subdivision of American literature, it is a part of American literature.
B. Thesis: African-American culture is a complex enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix. The matrix is a web of intersecting inputs and outputs. In other words, the complexity and what African-American culture means can be seen in blues.
C. What are the blues: They are a synthesis combining work songs, lament, struggle, loss, and gospel wisdom. The blues are a code that conditions the black cultural signifying (the guitar chords, the lyrics all stand for something else). The blues are also a force in the Hegelian sense. More generally they are a code for American culture. Criticism: If everything becomes the blues what is the interpretive value?
D. The book contains three chapters: one on slave narratives, one on black literary criticism, and one on 20th century black fiction.
E. Slave narratives
1. These narratives operate on an economic frame of reference. Each narrator responds to his or her condition as a commodity and inverts this “economics of slavery.” Equiano (The Life of Olaudah Equiano) responds to being an object of trade by becoming a successful trader in non-human goods himself. Frederick Douglass achieves literacy as a means of denying the owner his exchange value. Linda Brent’s only value is her womb so she gives it to a man other than her owner. This is much like Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll. The slaves make their own world.
F. Literary criticism
1. Generational shift: A ideologically motivated movement designed to refute the work of ones predecessors (Baker says it is like a Kuhnian paradigm shift). There have been 2 distinct generational shifts in African-American literary theory
a) Integrationist poetics. This is the optimistic prediction in the 1950s and 1960s that African-American literature might be soon indistinguishable from mainstream literature. The basis for this optimism was Brown (1954).
b) Black Aesthetic. The next shift occurred in the 1960s when non-violent protest failed to achieve any results. This was the shift to Black Power and the separatist Muslim movement. This was the belief that there was something different, or unique about African-American literature.
2. Here Baker looks at people like Gates who applies structuralist and poststructuralist critical methods to black literary texts. Baker accuses these people of isolating this literature from its black historical context. He says that these theorists only use methods by other white critics. The irony is that Baker does the same with a more extensive group of white Marxist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic critics.
G. Black fiction
1. Richard Wright. A ‘black hole’ is a useful trope for reexamining Wright. A black whole is an invisible, attractive force which draws all other objects to its center. The authors that follow Wright are all drawn in. Wright is the master of Black Wholeness (attracts all nearby stars and gives birth to a stellar-brightness of successors). He was the one who brought the blues into black literature. He was the first to present black culture as it is.
2. Ralph Ellison. Here we see an extended commentary on Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. The Trueblood episode in Invisible Man deconstructs racist and capitalist sign systems while seeming to validate them. This story is a pejorative commentary of the castrating effects of white philanthropy. It is also symbolic of a historical regression to a time before exogamy (or white Southern morality) became the established norm. Trueblood’s act is an act of rebellion.
B. Thesis: African-American culture is a complex enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrix. The matrix is a web of intersecting inputs and outputs. In other words, the complexity and what African-American culture means can be seen in blues.
C. What are the blues: They are a synthesis combining work songs, lament, struggle, loss, and gospel wisdom. The blues are a code that conditions the black cultural signifying (the guitar chords, the lyrics all stand for something else). The blues are also a force in the Hegelian sense. More generally they are a code for American culture. Criticism: If everything becomes the blues what is the interpretive value?
D. The book contains three chapters: one on slave narratives, one on black literary criticism, and one on 20th century black fiction.
E. Slave narratives
1. These narratives operate on an economic frame of reference. Each narrator responds to his or her condition as a commodity and inverts this “economics of slavery.” Equiano (The Life of Olaudah Equiano) responds to being an object of trade by becoming a successful trader in non-human goods himself. Frederick Douglass achieves literacy as a means of denying the owner his exchange value. Linda Brent’s only value is her womb so she gives it to a man other than her owner. This is much like Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll. The slaves make their own world.
F. Literary criticism
1. Generational shift: A ideologically motivated movement designed to refute the work of ones predecessors (Baker says it is like a Kuhnian paradigm shift). There have been 2 distinct generational shifts in African-American literary theory
a) Integrationist poetics. This is the optimistic prediction in the 1950s and 1960s that African-American literature might be soon indistinguishable from mainstream literature. The basis for this optimism was Brown (1954).
b) Black Aesthetic. The next shift occurred in the 1960s when non-violent protest failed to achieve any results. This was the shift to Black Power and the separatist Muslim movement. This was the belief that there was something different, or unique about African-American literature.
2. Here Baker looks at people like Gates who applies structuralist and poststructuralist critical methods to black literary texts. Baker accuses these people of isolating this literature from its black historical context. He says that these theorists only use methods by other white critics. The irony is that Baker does the same with a more extensive group of white Marxist, deconstructive, and psychoanalytic critics.
G. Black fiction
1. Richard Wright. A ‘black hole’ is a useful trope for reexamining Wright. A black whole is an invisible, attractive force which draws all other objects to its center. The authors that follow Wright are all drawn in. Wright is the master of Black Wholeness (attracts all nearby stars and gives birth to a stellar-brightness of successors). He was the one who brought the blues into black literature. He was the first to present black culture as it is.
2. Ralph Ellison. Here we see an extended commentary on Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. The Trueblood episode in Invisible Man deconstructs racist and capitalist sign systems while seeming to validate them. This story is a pejorative commentary of the castrating effects of white philanthropy. It is also symbolic of a historical regression to a time before exogamy (or white Southern morality) became the established norm. Trueblood’s act is an act of rebellion.
June 28, 2007
A great foundation book for studying the blues
July 22, 2020
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January 6, 2008it's been awhile so i'm re-reading it for threshholds where resistance figures in blues vernacular of black literary criticism and black musical expression. maybe i'll find more.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews