Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

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

Biography

Youth and education

Gates was born in Piedmont, West Virginia, and raised in the nearby mill town of Keyser. He is of African American descent, his own DNA analysis shows he also past European ancestry. Gates, who initially enrolled at Potomac State College, transferred as an undergraduate to Yale College where he 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 Bachelor of Arts 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coursework requirements, Gates spent his final undergraduate year writing, under the guidance of John Morton Blum, an unpublished book entitled The Making of a Governor, which described John D. Rockefeller IV's gubernatorial campaign in West Virginia. In 1973, Gates graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in history from Yale.

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 studied English literature at Clare College. With the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he worked toward his MA and Ph.D. 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." 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, Gates also counts Raymond Williams, George Steiner, and John Holloway among the European scholars who influenced him.

Career

Gates withdrew after a month at Yale Law School, and in October 1975 he was hired by Charles T. Davis 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. After being denied tenure, he left for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay at Duke University, he moved to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and as Professor of English. Additionally, he serves as the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

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." 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."

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," adding, "It's as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn't appreciate Shakespeare because I'm not Anglo-Saxon. I think it's vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth.”

Mediating a position between radicals advocating separatism and traditionalists guarding a fixed, highly homogeneous 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 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 assembled 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 the manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

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. Gates' prominence in this field led to him being tapped as a witness on behalf of the controversial Florida rap group 2 Live Crew in their obscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-American vernacular, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.

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.”

African American Lives

Gates has been the host and co-producer of African American Lives (2006) and African American Lives 2 (2008) in which the lineage of notable African Americans is traced using genealogical resources and DNA testing. In the first series, Gates learns of his White ancestry (50%), and in the second installment we learn he is descended from the Irish King, Niall of the Nine Hostages. He also learns that he is descended in part from the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

Honors and awards

Gates has been the recipient of nearly 50 honorary degrees and numerous academic and social action awards. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1981 and was listed in Time among its “25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997. On October 23, 2006, Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. In January 2008, he co-founded The Root, a website dedicated to African-American perspectives published by The Washington Post Company. Gates currently chairs the Fletcher Foundation, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is on the boards of many notable institutions including the New York Public Library, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Aspen Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, HEAF (the Harlem Educational Activities Fund), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located in Stanford, California.

In 2006, Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution, after he traced his lineage back to John Redman, a Free Negro who fought in the Revolutionary War.

The popular Harvard-area burger restaurant, Mr. Bartley's Burger Cottage, sells a Professor Skip Gates burger topped with pineapple and teriyaki sauce.

Works

Bibliography

Author

• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1987). Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self. First edition, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey. First edition, New York: Oxford University Press. American Book Award winner
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1992). Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. First edition, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1994). Colored People: A Memoir. First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; Cornel West (1996). The Future of the Race. First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; McKay, Nellie Y The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. First edition, W. W. Norton.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1997). Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man. First edition, New York: Random House.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1999). Wonders of the African World. First edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1999). Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. First edition, New York: Basic Civitas Books.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2000). The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century. First edition, New York: Free Press.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2007). Finding Oprah's Roots: Finding Your Own. First edition, New York: Crown.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.; Higginbotham, E.B. (2008). African American National Biography. First edition, New York: Oxford University Press. Editor
• Crafts, Hannah; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (2002). The Bondwoman's Narrative. First edition, New York: Warner Books.

Filmography

• 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)
• America Beyond the Color Line, Host and Scriptwriter, (four part series) PBS, 2004.
• African American Lives, Host and Narrator, PBS, February 2006
• African American Lives 2, Host and Narrator, PBS, February 2008

CD-ROM

• Appiah, Anthony; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr (1999). Microsoft Encarta Africana Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture. First edition, Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corp.

References

External links

• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Harvard Faculty webpage
• 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.
• http://www.pbs.org/previews/colorline_gate