I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

I Don't Hate The South takes its title from the famous declaration by Faulkner's character Quentin Compson in the novel Absalom, Absalom!. The book traces Baker's own ambivalent relationship to the South and its various protocols of family and black expressive cultural independence through a
memoiristic recounting of the author's various academic posts, family dramas, travels, and engagements with that most famous of southern authors, William Faulkner as well as the black expressive experimentalists Percival Everett and Ralph Ellison. I Don't Hate The South's central claim is that
the South is a laboratory, metaphor, and proving ground for American polity as a whole. W. E. B. Du Bois noted: As the South goes, so goes the nation! Houston Baker sets out to show the present-day wisdom of Du Bois's observation in a post-Hurricane Katrina moment of national family crisis. With
incisive wit, scrupulous literary and cultural analysis, and vivid portraits of members of his own family, the author provides captivating reading and an object lesson on the United States' regional and national interdependence.


Author: Houston A. Baker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 08/06/2007
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.60w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780195084290

About the Author

Houston A. Baker, Jr. is a native of Louisville, Kentucky. Currently Distinguished University Professor of English as Vanderbilt University, he has taught at Yale, the Universities of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and Duke. His books include Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism, Re-Reading Booker T., Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing and Black Fathers and Sons in America, and Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature.

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