Houston Baker’s Critical
Memory (University of Georgia Press, 2001) is a meditation on how, why and
where his values are grounded. A few
students of African American intellectual history may genuinely admire Baker’s
indebtedness to Richard Wright’s racial wisdom, his gratitude to his parents
for modeling civic virtues in the pressure cooker of segregation, and his
critique of race as “the ruling idea that conjures and pronounces sentences of
guilt or innocence…on we who are black by
choice…or due to inescapable circumstances” (10). Transcendentalists who
fed on denial, thin air and mental narcotics will not admire, I suspect, Baker’s
Old Testament forthrightness. He is too
much like Fred Daniels, the man who lived underground. His truth-telling brings discomfort. Despite potential threats of minority
condemnation, Baker has written an eloquent testimony on the power of autobiographical
examination. Critical Memory is a thick description of historicity.
Richard Wright is the tutelary spirit of the book, modified
versions of the 1997 Averitt Lectures at Georgia State University. His presence influenced Baker’s angles of
vision regarding the topics of “Black Modernity,” “Failed Memory,” and “Words
for Black Fathers and Sons in America.”
That Baker chose not to mention Wright’s The Long Dream (1958) in the third lecture on fathers and sons is a
slight surprise. The more delightful
surprise is Baker’s treatment of the word like
as verb and preposition in the first lecture, a strong way of illuminating why
neither Wright nor he are “likeable” in the eyes of those who champion America’s
War on Decency. The second lecture delivers a shock of recognition about Ralph
Ellison’s beloved American novel Invisible
Man. Baker’s is an elegant rendition of James Brown’s “The Big Payback,”
contrasting Wright’s active critique of capitalism with Ellison’s aesthetic
hibernation in “a colorblind, literarily allusive prison of language”
(30). The acidic exposure of Ellison’s
failure of critical memory is sharp and unsettling; it is an effective use of
Baker’s version of critical memory in the service of iconoclasm. It is a concise precursor of the sustained
iconoclasm in Arnold Rampersad’s biography of Ellison. Baker’s example of stern honesty may be one
reason he is not mentioned in William M. Banks’s Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (1996), a book authenticated by the
very likeable John Hope Franklin. Critical memory cuts both ways.
From Singers of Daybreak
(1974) to Betrayal (2008), Baker has
provided many iterations of critical memory.
His manipulations of theoretical postures constitute a body of work that
merits scrutiny. It can be argued, without exaggeration, that his work casts a
long shadow over men who “have gladly accepted the affirmative action benefits
bestowed by race in America while writing fiercely and with studied hypocrisy
that there is no such thing in America as race” (39). Even the hypothetical
village idiot in the United States knows that race matters, that American
literary and cultural criticism is indelibly marked by “race.” Critical
Memory is, in just this sense, a mirror for critics in need of
self-assessment.
Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. PHBW
BLOG
March 13, 2013
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