Workings of the Spirit

Houston Baker's new study engages two highly charged topics in literary scholarship: black women's writing and the place of theory in Afro-American literary criticism. The outpouring of novels, poems, and essays by black women writers in recent years has fruitfully complicated relations between feminist and Afro-American literary criticism. Turning on inspired interpretations of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange, Workings of the Spirit weighs current critical approaches to black women's writing against Baker's own account of the persistently theoretical character of Afro-American intellectual history.