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

Taking its title from the famous denial spoken by Faulkner's narrator in Absalom, Absalom! Baker skillfully weaves a narrative which takes the reader through his own family dramas, academic and personal travels, and remarkable literary encounters. As a young academic Baker enters into the complex world of Faulkner with scholarly intentions; however, the immediacy of family, race, and southern reglon in Faulkner's world leads Baker to a more personal, but also paradoxically more global, meditation. The genealogical, historical, and political landscapes of the South serve as a rich resource for a unique style of critical memoir, from which emerges a Global South reimagined for the twenty-first century. Book jacket.

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.