Baker, Houson A., Jr. Workings of the Spirit.

Though I skimmed most of this book and struggled to understand his jargon-laden style, his conclusion was the most fascinating thing I've read in awhile. The text argues for Afro-American women's expressive poetics, articulating some of its qualities and limits in a similar fashion to those themes and issues raised before. But he is obsessed with power and the establishment of this work within the academic and academic theoretical discourse. In the conclusion, he concedes that the project began when a close female friend was raped and they both found solace and renewal in reading black women's writing. He began to re-read his own traditions (Native Son, for instance) and found a completely different perspective, both on the literature he had felt control over, and the halls of power/his geographic settings and his political surroundings.

In other words, he woke up to the truly social nature of violence against black women's bodies, and that was the original response to this trilogy of theoretical texts trying to lay out a sense of the field of Afro-American literature.

His jargon is impenetrable and I think his readings of late 19th century texts are not nuanced. However, he is right about the content and the politics of late 20th century women's writing, in that the themes are similar and accurate and the impact they have on daily life is really brought home in his own story. Thank god: his theoretical and subjective positions are at last articulated together, rather than being split. He commits his own errors.

He also articulates his love for theory and his nationalist roots. He argues that black women's writing often falls into either "Black Power"--speaking to a white audience like a slave showing its back--or "Black Studies," which I now don't quite recall, but seems to have to do with postmodernism and the turn to theory in the academy. Black women writers responded with a more historicizing approach, which he critiques as being essentialist, without demonstrating that he understands the contingent subjectivity that black women's intellectual traditions depends on. This historiography of theories is dull and doesn't add that much, other than his effort to articulate the poetics of black women's writing. Leaving aside Baker's philosophical engagements--with phenomenology and deconstructive theory--I will summarize his interest in "conjure" as the act of black women's writing that invokes the spirit space.

"I believe the Afro-American cultural sign that appropriately unites mythomania as classical cultural performance, notions of the classical medium's space, and useful notions of the poetic image is the sign 'conjure'." (77)

... ok, so i need to read this chapter on conjure. just fucking post this and take a nap.

Things to think about:
--should I read this again? I didn't seem to understand too much of what he was saying and feel severely critical, which is usually what happens when I'm confused.
--how does this fit in with my work? It extends the things I know about African American literary criticism and illuminatest he difficulty this work has in being grasped in its completeness, sincei t seems like every critic projects a certain amount of "daughter" status and limited worldview onto the black women's intellectual tradition.