Critique of Turning South Again

In Turning South Again, Houston Baker is taking a stab at explaining the painful truths of American racism. The author argues that the American South and its regulating institutions have always been at the center of the African American experience. He draws parallels between the strictures on black mobility of the old plantation system and a current "prison-industrial" complex. He uses his own experience of growing up in Louisville to analyze the place of blacks in American society. The first half of the book deals with modernism’s performative masquerade in the persona of Booker T, Washington, the Tuskegee Institute and the black south mobility. The second half of the book deals with plantations, ships and black modernism.
The controlling purpose or thesis of the book is to examine the author’s own memories, the “ineradicable dilemmas of black modernism, and the protocols of black male subject formation.” The author identifies the South as the primary moving force in the hi...