Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.

by Houston A. Baker Jr.

In Turning South Again the distinguished and award-winning essayist, poet, and scholar of African American literature Houston A. Baker, Jr. offers a revisionist account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. With a take on the work of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute surprisingly different from that in his earlier book Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and whiteness studies to argue that the American South and its regulating institutions—particularly that of incarceration—have always been 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. Even 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 participation in the public sphere and economic solvency for the majority of African Americans. By including a section about growing up in the South, as well as his recent return to assume a professorship at Duke, Baker contributes further to one of the book’s central a call to centralize the South in American cultural studies.

128 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2001

About the author

Houston 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.

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 1 out of 5]

For God's sake and your own, skip "Turning South Again."

This book is filled with ridiculous speculations and assertions. For example: "Am I saying there existed a deeply homoerotic bond between Booker T. Washington and all white men -but in particular and most expressly between the Wizard of Tuskegee and General Armstrong? Yes." (page 73)

If you are interested in analyzing Booker Washington's life and work, I recommend reading Louis Harlan's work or Robert Norrell's or Michael Bieze's -or the work of anyone other than Huston Baker, for that matter.

[Humphrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those academic books that may be useful to reference the argument of but which isn't so useful for sustained analysis. It's part academic and part memoir, which is probably a fun thing to write but doesn't make for as productive a read.