- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Infobox Writer
name = Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
imagesize = 180px
birthdate = birth date and age|1950|9|16
birthplace =Piedmont, West Virginia ,United States
occupation =Author ,essayist , literary critic,professor
nationality =United States
period =
genre =Essay ,history ,literature
subject =African American Studies ,
movement =
influences =
influenced =
website =Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. (born
September 16 ,1950 ) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, andpublic intellectual . Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor atHarvard University , where he is Director of theW.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 nearbymill town of Keyser. He is ofAfrican American descent, his own DNA analysis shows he also past European ancestry.cite news | author=Richard Willing | title=DNA rewrites history for African-Americans | url=http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/genetics/2006-02-01-dna-african-americans_x.htm | work=USA Today | date=2006-02-01 | accessdate=2008-08-05] Gates, who initially enrolled atPotomac State College , transferred as an undergraduate toYale College where he spent a year volunteering at a mission hospital inTanzania and traveling throughout the African continent in order to complete the year-long “non-academic” requirement of his five-yearBachelor 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,cite web | author=History of American Civilization Program | title=Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | url=http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~amciv/faculty/gates.shtml | publisher=Harvard University | date=2008 | accessdate=2008-08-07] Gates spent his final undergraduate year writing, under the guidance ofJohn Morton Blum , an unpublished book entitled "The Making of a Governor", which described John D. Rockefeller IV's gubernatorial campaign in West Virginia.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. inhistory 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 theUniversity of Cambridge , where he studiedEnglish literature atClare College . With the assistance of aFord 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 andliterary theory .At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with
Wole Soyinka , aNigeria n 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."cite news | url=http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/gates/interview.html | title=Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Interview | publisher=National Endowment for the Humanities | author=Bruce Cole | date=2002 | accessdate=2007-01-04] Soyinka would later become the first African to be awarded theNobel 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 countsRaymond Williams ,George Steiner , andJohn 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 byCharles 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 deniedtenure , he left for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay atDuke University , he moved to his current position atHarvard 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 theW.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 onstructuralism ,post-structuralism , andsemiotics totextual analysis and matters ofidentity politics . As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of theEurocentric 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."cite web | url = http://www.gale.com/free_resources/bhm/bio/gates_h.htm
title = Black History - Biographies - Henry Louis Gates
publisher = Thomson Gale | accessdate = 2007-01-04] Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a black cultural aesthetic in his major scholarly work "The Signifying Monkey", a 1989American 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.” [Clarke, Breena and Susan Tifft "A 'Race Man' Argues for a Broader Curriculum: Henry Louis Gates Jr. Wants W.E.B. Dubois, Wole Soyinka and Phyllis Wheatley on the Nation's Reading Lists, As Well As Western Classics like Milton and Shakespeare." "Time": 137(16). 22 April 1991: 16.]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 . [cite web | author=W.E.B. Du Bois Institute | title=Black Periodical Literature Project | url=http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~du_bois/research_projects/black_periodical_literature_project.html | publisher=Harvard University | date=2008 | accessdate=2008-08-07] 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 byDominique de Menil inHouston, Texas . Earlier, as a result of his research as aMacArthur 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 defendrap music and an article in "Sports Illustrated " that criticizes black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received aGeorge 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 controversialFlorida rap group2 Live Crew in theirobscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-Americanvernacular , 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 notableAfrican American s is traced using genealogical resources andDNA testing. In the first series, Gates learns of hisWhite 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 theYoruba people ofNigeria .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. OnOctober 23 ,2006 , Gates was appointed the Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor at Harvard University. In January 2008, he co-foundedThe Root , a website dedicated to African-American perspectives published byThe Washington Post Company . Gates currently chairs theFletcher Foundation , and is a member of theCouncil on Foreign Relations . He is on the boards of many notable institutions including theNew York Public Library ,Jazz at Lincoln Center , theAspen Institute , theBrookings Institution , the Studio Museum of Harlem, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, HEAF (the Harlem Educational Activities Fund), and theCenter for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences , located inStanford, California .
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