Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Born:	November 16, 1950 (age 56) Piedmont, West Virginia, United States
Occupation:	Author, essayist, literary critic, professor
Nationality:	United States
Genres:	Essay, history, literature
Subjects:	African American Studies,
Debut works:	Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, 1987
Rediscovered the novel Our Nig, the first ever published in the United States written by an African-American.

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. (born September 16, 1950, Piedmont, West Virginia) is a literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Chair of the African and African American Studies Department and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Contents 1 Education and Career 2 Publications 2.1 Books 2.2 Films 2.3 CD-ROM 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Education and Career

Raised in the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who initially enrolled at Potomac State College, transferred as an undergraduate to Yale University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in History. While at Yale, Gates spent a year volunteering at a mission hospital in Tanzania and traveling throughout the African continent in order to complete the year-long “non-academic” requirement of his five-year BA program; upon his return, Gates wrote a guest column for the Yale Daily News about his experience. Having been appointed a “Scholar of the House” during his final year at Yale and thus relieved of academic coursework requirements, Gates spent his final undergraduate year writing, under the guidance of John Morton Blum, an unpublished book entitled The Once and Future King, which described John D. Rockefeller IV’s gubernatorial campaign in West Virginia. In 1973, Gates graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in History from Yale University.

The first African-American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the day after his undergraduate commencement, Gates set sail on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 for the University of Cambridge, where he discovered English Literature at Clare College and, with the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, worked toward his MA and PhD in English. While his work in history at Yale had trained him in archival work, Gates’ studies at Clare introduced him to English literature and literary theory. At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer denied an appointment in the department because, as Gates later recalled, African literature was at the time deemed “at best, sociology or socio-anthropology, but it was not real literature.”^[1] Soyinka would later become the first African to be awarded the Nobel Prize; he remained an influential mentor for Gates and became the subject of numerous works by Gates. Finding mentors in those with whom he shared a “common sensibility” rather than an ethnicity,^[1] Gates also counts Raymond Williams, George Steiner, and John Holloway among the European scholars who influenced him.

After a month at Yale Law School, Gates dropped out and in October 1975 was hired by John W. Blassingame as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale; in July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to Assistant Professor upon completion of his dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. Passed over for tenure at Yale in favor of literary critic Robert Stepto, Gates taught at Cornell University from 1985 to 1990, and then spent a year at Duke University before moving on to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and as Professor of English; he additionally serves as Chair of the African and African American Studies and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research.

The recipient of more than 30 honorary degrees and numerous academic and social action awards, Gates was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 and was listed among Time Magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To build Harvard’s visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a collection amassed by Dominique de Menil in Houston, Texas. Earlier, as a result of his research as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates had discovered Our Nig, the first novel in the United States written by a black person, Harriet E. Wilson, in 1859; he followed this discovery with the acquisition of a manuscript of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

As a literary theorist and critic, meanwhile, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics. As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon and has instead insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a “tone deafness to the black cultural voice” and result in “intellectual racism.”^[2] Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a black cultural aesthetic in his major scholarly work The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner; the work extended the application of the concept of “signifyin(g)” to analysis of African-American works and thus rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.

While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of black literature and black culture, Gates does not, advocate a “separatist” black canon but, rather, a greater recognition of black works that would be integrated into a larger, pluralistic canon. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition but envisions a loose canon of diverse works integrated by common cultural connections:

“Every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black...there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well.”^[2]

Moreover, Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is “ridiculous” to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, “It can’t be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,”^[1]

Mediating a position between radicals advocating separatism and traditionalists guarding a fixed, highly homogenous Western canon, Gates has faced criticisms from both sides; some criticize that the additional black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists feel that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in advocating integration.

As a prominent black intellectual, Gates has focused throughout his career not only on his research and teaching but on building academic institutions to study black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for black Americans and has written pieces in the New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in the New York Times.

Asked by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole about how Gates would describe what he does, Gates responded, “I would say I’m a literary critic. That’s the first descriptor that comes to mind. After that I would say I was a teacher. Both would be just as important.”^[1]

On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. He currently chairs the Fletcher Foundation.

[edit] Publications

(summarized from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Curriculum Vitae[1])

[edit] Books

• Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (Oxford University Press, 1987).
• The Signifying Monkey: Towards A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1988). Winner of the American Book Award.
• Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 1992)
• A Memoir (Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1994)
• Colored People: The Future of the Race (Knopf, 1996), with Cornel West
• Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (Random House, 1997)
• Wonders of the African World (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1999)
• Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (Perseus, 1999)
• The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century (Perseus, 2000)
• Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own (Crown, 2007)

Gates has also edited many books and written a wide number of essays, notably:

• The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (with Nellie Y. McKay, W. W. Norton, 1996; 2nd. Ed., 2005), a standard textbook

• The Bondwoman's Narrative, a Novel by Hannah Crafts (Virago Press 2002)

[edit] Films

• "From Great Zimbabwe to Kilimatinde," BBC/PBS, Great Rail Journeys, Narrator and Screenwriter, BBC/PBS, 1996.
• "The Two Nations of Black America," Host and Scriptwriter, Frontline, WGBH-TV, February 11, 1998.
• Leaving Eldridge Cleaver, WGBH, 1999
• Wonders of the African World, PBS, October 25-27, 1999 (six-part series) (Shown as Into Africa on BBC-2 in the United Kingdom and South Africa, Summer, 1999)
• African American Lives, Host and Narrator, PBS, February, 2006,

[edit] CD-ROM

• Encarta Africana

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Audio Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. - RealAudio
• Harvard Faculty Webpage for Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with links to biography, CV, and full list of publications
• Wonders of the African World Program with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for PBS
• Article from Harvard Gazette on Gates after C. West and K.A. Appiah left for Princeton
• Articles from the Harvard Crimson on Henry Louis Gates, Jr.