Books by Houston A. Baker

Reexamines major African American texts through the lenses of modernism, progressivism, architecture, avant-gardism, hybridity, and Continental theory

Relating the blues to American social and literary history and to Afro-American expressive culture, Baker 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.

Condemns those black intellectuals who, the author believes, have turned their backs on the tradition of racial activism in America. This work urges black intellectuals to forge both sacred and secular connections with local communities and rededicate themselves to social responsibility.

Offers an account of the struggle for black modernism in the United States. This book combines historical considerations with psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and whiteness studies to argue that the American South and its regulating institutions - particularly that of incarceration - are at the centre of the African-American experience.