小贝克·休斯顿教授访谈录

王祖友

(河南理工大学,焦作,454150)

ABriefIntroductiontoHoustonA.Baker:

Houston A. Baker was born in Louisville Kentucky. He received his BA from Howard University, and his MA and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. He has taught at Yale, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, and Duke. He is an excellent American scholar specializing in African-American literature and currently serving as a Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University in the English department. Baker served as president of the Modern Language Association and editor of the journalAmericanLiterature. Although Baker’s work with the MLA andAmericanLiteratureare remarkable achievements, he is best known as a prolific literary critic. He has written more than 90 articles, essays, and reviews, as well as authored or edited more than 20 books. In books such asLongBlackSong(1972),TheJourneyBack:IssuesinBlackLiteratureandCriticism(1980),ModernismandtheHarlemRenaissance(1987),Blues,Ideology,andAfro-AmericanLiterature:AVernacularTheory(1987),Afro-AmericanPoetics(1988),WorkingsoftheSpirit(1991),WorkingsoftheSpirit:ThePoeticsofAfro-AmericanWomen’sWriting(1993),CriticalMemory(2001), andTurningSouthAgain(2001),Baker analyzes the works of writers such as James Baldwin, Imamu Baraka, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Jean Toomer, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright. Baker is also a poet, and his volumes of poetry includeNoMatterWhereYouTravel,YouStillBeBlack(1979),SpiritRun(1982),BluesJourneysHome(1985), andPassingOver(2000). His bookBetrayal:HowBlackIntellectualsHaveAbandonedtheIdealsoftheCivilRightsErareceivedan American Book Award for 2009. Baker was included in the 2006 textbookFiftyKeyLiteraryTheoristsby Richard J. Lane.

Among Baker’s many honors are Competitive Scholarship, Howard University (1961-65); Kappa Delta Phi, Howard University (1965); John Hay Whitney Foundation Fellow (1965-66); NDEA Fellow, UCA (1965-68); Alfred Longueil Poetry Award, UCA (1966); Legion of Honor, Chapel of the Four Chaplains, Philadelphia Community Service Award (1981); Christian R. and Mary F. Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching, University of Pennsylvania (1984); Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement in Literature and the Humanities, Howard University (1985); Outstanding Alumnus Award of Howard University, Alumni Club of Greater Philadelphia (1985); Distinguished Writer of the Year, Middle-Atlantic Writers Association (1986); Creative Scholarship Award, College Language Association forAfro-AmericanPoetics(1988); and Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities (1990). He is the recipient of fellowships such as the John Simon Guggenheim (1978-79); National Humanities Center (1982-83); Rockefeller Research Fellowship Program for Minority Group Scholars (1982-83); and Council of the Humanities (Princeton), Whitney J. Oates Short-term Fellow (1991-92). Baker’s honorary doctorates include Berea College (1988), Williams College (1989), Beaver College (1990), Ursinus College (1990), State University of New York at Albany (1991), Knox College (1992), Marymount Manhattan College (1993), and the University of Louisville (1994). An additional honor was bestowed upon Baker when a special issue ofChungWai(November, 1993), was devoted to the “Work of Houston A. Baker Jr.”.

For four decades, he has been a leading figure in African American literary studies and a powerful voice among African American literary critics.

WangZuyou: Your work in African American literary studies has been called “groundbreaking” for your ability to connect theory about the texts with the historical conditions of the beginning of the African American community, namely, both their uprooting from Africa and their ability to maintain their African heritage through an emphasis on spirituality and on autobiography. What is the background of your work?

HoustonA.Baker,Jr.: When I was a young man, I was such a fierce and introspective reader that my father had, for my own good, to chastise me about my absence of “physical culture.” He wanted to know why I did not go to the neighboring playground and shoot hoops or to the gravelly field where my age cohort conducted rousing games of tackle football. He pretty much told me I had for the sake of my life and health to get out of both my head and our house. He was right, of course. So I took up weightlifting and bodybuilding, becoming at one very sparsely attended competition in Louisville, Kentucky,JuniorMr.Kentuckyin my weight class. I also trained seriously and participated with some success in high school in track and field. My father’s “push” probably did save my health. But books were ever on my mind. I became an English Major at Howard University, and it was Professor Charles Watkins who said to me on an overcast D.C. afternoon: “Mr. Baker, have you ever thought about becoming a university professor?” I had not, and I could not imagine ever being as smart and charismatic a person—much less a professional equivalent—of Dr. Watkins. He had set me on course nevertheless, and within several months of his question I was enrolled with a full fellowship in the Graduate English Department program at the University of California at Los Angeles. It still seems a miracle to me. But, in truth, a desperately demanding miracle. I finished my Ph.D. degree at UCLA in three years, writing my doctoral dissertation at the University of Edinburgh, and returning to Los Angeles for graduation and summer work. My graduate work was in English Literature, specifically Victorian Literature with a concentration on the Aesthetic Movement. When I accepted my first academic post at Yale University in 1968, I had two Victorian Literature articles in print in refereed journals. My thought was to write a biography of Oscar Wilde. But Richard Ellmann who was extraordinarily kind to me at Yale beat me to the punch! (That is, of course, a joke to those who understand the majesty of Professor Ellmann as a biographer.) Shortly after I had settled in at Yale, the Black Revolution broke like implacable intellectual and activist rain over academic America.BlackStudiesintheUniversitycompiled from a major Yale conference became a guide to the future of an influential discipline. And I was drawn into a new dispensation and way of life by Black men and women from many walks of life—Yale Black Faculty, Dixwell and Hill community residents of New Haven, and national Black Arts and Black Power artists/activists. Another life miracle. I turned my intellectual energies to Black American Literary Studies, Black Studies, and Black Academic Activism. When I entered the contest and competition and dramatic reorientation, I had no trepidation whatsoever. As my good friend Addison Gayle put it by telling me the following: “Old man, I never expected to be a graduate student at UCLA, so I never worried of course about my possible fate as a professor or somehow being governed by fear of disturbing the white academic peace!” Precisely! So I got to work, adopted a new wardrobe and intellectual perspective. I am a poet—as an avocation, but, yes, published—and I always thought there was an underlying spiritual impulse to one’s best writing and life efforts. Call it “romantic” if you will. But I never set out to be rich, exhibitionist, or “A-Listed.” I set myself to follow James Baldwin’s injunction that he wanted to be a good man and an honest writer. Further, he wanted to capture those aspects of Black Life that are nuanced and spiritual ... deep as the rivers of Babylon ... and (re)sounded by harps of the sufferers. The more I read in Black American Literature and Culture, the more I was convinced that we are a spiritual people, moved and saved and made resolute by the ineffable, finding even in dark holes of abjection strategies of survival and sounding. We are always already party to the types of “memory” that Western Philosophy and Post-Colonial, and Subaltern melancholia are trying—still—to figure out. We knew the nature of our foreclosed horizons of future, but knew we would not die to our beauty and resilience. I eventually published a volume of poetry—thanks to the inimitable Naomi Long Madgett—titledSpiritRun.

Wang: Your work in the 1970s focused on locating and mapping the origins of the “black aesthetic”, such as found in the Black Arts Movement and the attendant development of anthologies, journals and monographs about African American literature. Will you please elaborate on your idea of “black aesthetic”?

Baker: Well, the answer here is fairly straightforward. It might suffice to repeat the poet and critic Larry Neal’s pronouncement that the Black Arts Movement is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power Movement. Of course some will (and perhaps justifiably) read gender and even sexuality and queer implications in Neal’s coding of matters. Who can ever forget that Black America has suffered from putative friends like Robert E. Park who named “the Negro Race” the “lady of the races.” Why? Well, as the so-called “Orient,” and centuries later “Asian American Studies” were to discover: There is only one race that produces intrepid, unequivocal, and universal MAN. Wow! Park as a late avatar of Thomas Jefferson who wrote blacks as less than whitely human, even while bedding Sally Hemmings and profiting from the wisdom of the black slave who architecturally helped him lay out the University of Virginia. So the macho exclusivism of the existing paradigm and hegemonic maintenance of WHITE MAN, ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERARY STUDY required, for sure, address in BLACK MAN terms. Naturally, this is a double bind and a regrettable situation. Why “sister” as a term for aesthetics and the arts? It was a product ofblackmachismoand fantasies of a black warrior arms-and-the-man and his dutiful (read: exploited) woman companion/support system. But don’t get me wrong, when there was “stepping up” to be done and resistant “hell to be raised” against white hegemony, the ranks were integrated—amazing black men and women in concert. I am thinking: Niki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Marie Evans, Margaret Walker, Ntosaki Shange, and legions more who were in the forefront. It was also, we should remember, LeRoi Jones (later, self-renamed Amiri Baraka) who wrote and publishedTheToilet, a play that deals unabashedly with homophobia. The institutional details of the Black Aesthetic are a history of black self-determination, self-help, institution building, and scholastic and artistic networking. The Black Aesthetic—all “neo- and post-” shrewd denials to the contrary—is alive and well today. As my wonderful and brilliant young colleague Professor Margo Crawford states the matter in Faulknerian repetition: What was is. And there is no end in sight. Professor Crawford suggests concentrated reading and honest study for those who wish to know the Black Aesthetic, and their inescapable imbrication in its endurance.

Wang: InModernismandtheHarlemRenaissance, you take black critics to task for accepting the common notion that the Harlem Renaissance was a failure and then show how notions of modernism based on European and Anglo-American texts are “inappropriate for understanding Afro-American modernism”. So how do you think one should understand Afro-American modernism?

Baker: I have been entirely gratified by the reception ofModernismandtheHarlemRenaissance. To be very brief, I think what was teased out by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar and its participants at the University of Pennsylvania many years ago was what is now a readily accepted and theorized observation that the so-called “Enlightenment” is rife through and through with terror and sophisms that have no “modernist” resonance within the lives and genealogies of those crushed, demolished, subjugated by the “Enlightened.” Black modernism and modernity are contingent phenomena. Why? They are both co-determinant upon resources for “modernization” that are always in short supply from the reigning hegemons. It may seem enigmatic, but I think it illustrative that we in the U.S. have a black president, but in the majority, even less largesse and modernity are available than at perhaps any time in our travels on the planet. Think: 2.5 million subject to mass incarceration (mostly black and brown) and another three to five million on any given day under the eyes of probation, parole, temporary protection orders, etc. Then, of course, abroad there are two U.S. wars, and the cozy and problematic “friending” of our president and Prime Minister Netanyahu. That militarized cozying up takes place on-site, in Israel, which now projects and puts in place more than 500 miles of (and here I am short circuiting details) concrete, 20-foot-high steel and razor wire, and other fortifications to wall itself off from the “Middle East.” Is it aberrant to suggest that what a certain “world” now means by its relationship to the word “modernism” is not far removed in its hegemonic and bellicose violence from the Enlightenment? Which is to say, “reason” expressed as wealth, terror, and violence makes those who deploy the word as a mark of “civilization” ridiculous.

Wang: By examining the literature of the Harlem Renaissance in conversation with contemporaneous developments in African American music, art and philosophy, you identify the development of “new modes of production” that lead to a rebirth of African American literature. Why do you call these modes “blues geographies”?

Baker: This one is even briefer, and I summon the grand good sonorousness of poet Michael Harper to the fore. It is Harper that tells us our history is our “jam session” with “instruments technically down.” He also segues of course into the prior question by telling us that all of American history is the sound of a rifle cocking. We have resiliently endured through what I call in one of my poems inBluesJourneysHome: “blues beneath the skin.” Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and so many more are “go-to” in the long trek to grasp the significance of the blues in our resistant quest to find our “free selves.” Of course, I have a book that I still do love calledBlues,Ideology,andAfro-AmericanLiteraturethat attempts its own blues explications and critical riffs.

Wang: In your bookTurningSouthAgain:RethinkingModernism/RereadingBookerT, you suggest that being a black American, even a successful one, amounts to a kind of prison sentence. Do you still hold such a pessimistic view of American social progress where race is concerned? Why?

Baker: I do hold what some would call a “pessimistic” view and others would deem, I think, a “realistic” assessment. I try not to forget Malcolm X’s and George Jackson’s declarations about incarceration. At the commencement of a legendary public speech Malcolm says that some of the audience will be shocked to learn that Malcolm was once in prison, then he says to the audience: “All of you are in prison, and its name is America.” Later Malcolm points out that if the hegemonic power has plunged a knife into your back nine inches and then pulls it out six inches, you are still imprisoned and dying. Integration does not remove you from the solitary confinement of “race.” Similarly, George Jackson long ago pointed out that the walls of the prison may be designed to keep “felons” in, but realistically they are also designed (like one might say Israeli fortifications) to keep “you” (always “othered”) blind to the carceral machinations of the state. White privilege, hegemonic and militarized global power that is “on top” never provide a space for verifiable declarations by the “other” of his and her freedom.

Wang: You are one of the fifty theorists that appear in Richard J. Lane’sFiftyKeyLiteraryTheorists. What is your special contribution to theory that distinguishes you from other theorists in the hall of fame?

Baker: My concentration is reading and re-reading the spirit work of African America. I do so without fear or shame (to invoke Langston Hughes). I work and pray always in the hope of canceling all offices of the privileged and their lies. My sympathies are with those who are silenced and oppressed, which is to say, any human congregation anywhere in its quest for freedom and self-determination.

MayorCriticalBooksbyHoustonA.Baker,Jr.:

Baker, Houston A. (1980).TheJourneyBack:IssuesinBlackLiteratureandCriticism. University of Chicago Press.

Baker, Houston A. (1984).Blues,Ideology,andAfro-AmericanLiterature:AVernacularTheory. University of Chicago Press.

Baker, Houston A. (1987).ModernismandtheHarlemRenaissance. University of Chicago Press.

Baker, Houston A. (1993).BlackStudies,Rap,andtheAcademy. University of Chicago Press.

Baker, Houston A. (2001).TurningSouthAgain:Re-ThinkingModernism/Re-ReadingBookerT. Duke University Press.

Baker, Houston A. (2009).Betrayal:HowBlackIntellectualsHaveAbandonedtheIdealsoftheCivilRightEra. Columbia University Press.