Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 1950–

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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 1950–

Literary scholar, professor, critic

At a Glance…

Defined Black Literary Critical Approach

Defended 2 Live Crew

Attacked Black Representation and Separatism

Selected writings

Sources

In 1964, when Henry Louis Gates Jr. was 14 years old, he suffered a hairline fracture of the ball-and-socket joint of the hip while playing touch football in his hometown of Piedmont, West Virginia. He didn’t realize the severity of the injury until a few weeks later when the joint sheared apart while he was walking.

The white doctor who examined Gates shortly afterward questioned the boy about his injury as well as his career plans. When the young Gates replied that he wanted to be a doctor and then correctly answered many questions about science, the doctor made his diagnosis. He told Gates to stand and walk, and the young boy fell to the floor in intense pain. The doctor then turned to Gates’s mother and explained that her son’s problem was psychosomatic—a black boy from Appalachia who wanted to be a doctor in the mid-1960s was an overachiever. Years later Gates wrote in an article for the New York Times that “’overachiever’ designated a sort of pathology: the overstraining of your natural capacity.” As a result of the misdiagnosis, Gates’s right leg is more than two inches shorter than his left.

Since that time Gates has been trying to overcome not only his personal physical handicap but the societal handicap of racism as well. “The most subtle and pernicious form of racism against blacks [is] doubt about our intellectual capacities,” he explained to Maurice Berger in Art in America. Gates has easily dispelled such doubts, having earned some of the highest scholastic achievements and placing himself in a position to argue logically and eloquently for a multicultural approach to education.

To appreciate the contributions of African-Americans to the cultural history of America, for example, Gates believes one must understand the indigenous culture out of which those achievements arose. Since Gates feels that “culture is always a conversation among different voices,” as he wrote in the New York Times, it is the history of the black voice in black literature, with its recurring themes, figurative expressions, lyricism, and dissonance, that must be studied.

After having graduated summa cum laude from Yale University with a degree in history, Gates won fellowships to study at the Clare College of Cambridge University in England. It was there that he met the Nigerian playwright and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, who became a mentor for Gates. Instructing him in the mythology and writings of

At a Glance…

Born September 16, 1950, in Keyser, WV; son of Henry Louis (a paper loader) and Pauline Augusta (Coleman) Gates; married Sharon Lynn Adams, September 1, 1979; children: Maude, Elizabeth. Education : Yale University, B.A. (summa cum laude), 1973; Clare College, Cambridge University (England), M.A., 1974, Ph.D., 1979. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Episcopalian.

Time, London Bureau, staff correspondent, 1973-75; American Cyanamid Co., public relations representative, 1975; Yale University, New Haven, CT, lecturer, 1976-79, assistant professor of English, 1979-84, director of department of undergraduate Afro-American studies, 1979-85, associate professor of English, 1984-85; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, professor of English and African Studies, 1985-90, W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Literature, 1988-90; Duke University, Durham, NC, John Spenser Bassett Professor of English, 1990-91; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, W.E.B. DuBois Professor of the Humanities, 1991—, chair of department of African-American Studies, 1991—.Created television series The Image of the Black in the Western Imagination, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 1982. Consultant to Menil Foundation.

Member: International PEN, Afro-American Academy (president), Modern Language Association.

Awards: Grants from National Endowment for the Humanities, 1980-84, and MacArthur Foundation, 1981-86; Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 1981; American Book Award, 1989, for The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism; Anisfield-Wolfe Book Award, 1989.

Addresses: Office —African-American Studies Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Agent—Carl Brandt, Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc., 1501 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

the Yoruba people of Nigeria, Soyinka convinced Gates to study literature, specifically African-American literature and its lineage from and similarities to the literary traditions of Africa and the Caribbean.

Almost immediately after his completion of a doctorate degree in English language and literature in 1979, Gates won acclaim for his critical essays on black literature. In 1981 the MacArthur Foundation recognized him as one of 21 gifted individuals, giving him a five-year grant totaling $150,000. It was his rediscovery and republication in 1983 of Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig, the first novel published in the United States by a black person, however, that placed Gates at the forefront of black scholars. The novel was originally published in 1859 but immediately ignored, only to later be labeled the work of a white man. Gates’s almost archeological approach in verifying the original author helped extend the African-American literary tradition by more than 30 years.

Gates’s Black Periodical Literature Project, begun in 1980, also benefitted from the acclaim of Our Nig’s republication. More money was consequently infused into the project, which exhumed nineteenth-century black literary works buried in periodicals. Spurred on by the belief of black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers that it is “the heritage of the mother that the African-American male must regain as an aspect of his own personhood—the power of ‘yes’ to the ‘female’ within,” as Gates quoted Spillers in the New York Times Book Review, he focused on the literary accomplishments of black women from that period, culminating in his editing the thirty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, published in 1988. Eric J. Sundquist, critiquing the publication for the New York Times Book Review, believed it would alter the landscape of American cultural thought, demonstrating “that black men and black women have never hesitated to grasp the pen and write their own powerful story of freedom.”

But it has been Gates’s critical approach, the definition of a black literary theory, that has attracted the most attention, including critics’ skepticism. In Black Literature and Literary Theory, published in 1984 and edited by Gates, he attacked the notion of the traditional, Eurocentric literary canon by proposing the establishment of a black literary canon. But Terry Eagleton, writing in the New York Times Book Review, maintained that the essays included in the book discourage such a notion; while enriching our perception of black literary works, he found they also “implicitly question the authoritarianism of a literary ‘canon.’”

Gates, however, has remained resolute in his belief. “Long after white American literature has been anthologized and canonized, and recanonized,” he stated in the New York Times Book Review, “our efforts to define a black American canon are often decried as racist, separatist, nationalist, or ’essentialist.’” Gates further insists that the reason black works are not included is because the traditional canon is based on Western or European culture. He argues that most systems used to judge art are culturally specific. Black work cannot be appreciated or criticized on the basis of a Western cultural aesthetic. He told Art in America’s Berger there must be “systems that account for the full complexity of American art, music, and literature—in all their multicolored strains…. To say that black art is a thing apart, separate from the whole, is a racist fiction. We have to conceive a new aesthetic status for American art in all of its facets.”

Defined Black Literary Critical Approach

Gates tried to provide the basis on which to judge black literary works, defining their own cultural aesthetic, in his seminal work The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, a 1989 American Book Award winner. Gates proposed the theory that black writers, as Andrew Delbanco explained in the New Republic, “throw off the oppressive weight of their predecessors by first incorporating, then transforming, them.” Gates labels this parodic technique “Signifyin(g)”—indicating the omission of the final “g” as is often done in the black vernacular. And it is in the black vernacular tradition that Gates locates the true black literary criticism.

Africans transported to America before the outlaw of slavery refused to learn the white slave owners’ language, thereby preventing assimilation into the fabricated caste system. According to Gates, they instead created their own version of that language to safeguard themselves. “Signifying is verbal play—serious play that serves as instruction, entertainment, mental exercise, preparation for interacting with friend or foe in the social arena,” John Wideman pointed out in the New York Times Book Review. “In black vernacular, Signifying is a sign that words cannot be trusted, that even the most literal utterance allows room for interpretation, that language is both carnival and minefield.”

Parody and allusion, prevalent in African myths and African-American folktales, are intimate forms of this black vernacular verbal play, and the interpretive act is endless. “Gates means that repetition, revision, and usurpation are as integral to black street talk as they are to Western poetry,” Delbanco wrote. Therefore, to understand black literary works, Gates argues, one must understand the purposes behind the black vernacular tradition of endlessly playing against itself—varying, revising, extending. An example of signifying that Gates cites is a line from a monologue by H. Rap Brown: “Ain’t nothing bad ’bout you but your breath.” Delbanco noted that the word “bad” in this instance “is simultaneously an endorsement and a reversal of the conventional meaning of the word in white usage. Both meanings, white and black, are present. The word is thereby enriched.”

Defended 2 Live Crew

Gates called on this tradition of language as a game in helping to defend the rap group 2 Live Crew against obscenity charges in Florida in 1990. He wrote in the New York Times that 2 Live Crew’s “exuberant use of hyperbole (phantasmagoric sexual organs, for example) undermines—for anyone fluent in black cultural codes—a too literal-minded hearing of the lyrics. This is the street tradition called ’signifying’ or ’playing the dozens,’ which has generally been risque.” Gates further tied the group’s approach to the black mythic tradition, explaining to a reporter from Jet that in 2 Live Crew’s music “what you hear is great humor, great joy, and great boisterousness. It’s a joke. It’s a parody and parody is one of the most venerated forms of art.”

It is the lack of understanding in American society of the function and value of this black tradition, Gates believes, that has fostered intellectual racism—a tone deafness to the black cultural voice. Gates does not call for the precedence of black culture over its Western counterpart. “I wouldn’t want to get rid of anything in [the Western] tradition,” he told Breena Clarke and Susan Tifft of Time. “I think the Western tradition has been a marvelous, wonderful tradition. But it’s not the only tradition full of great ideas.” Gates argues instead for an understanding and appreciation of the logical interconnection of cultural works, of their integrated diversity: “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,” he commented in the New York Times Book Review. “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.”

Attacked Black Representation and Separatism

The absence of black works in the artistic cultural milieu, according to Gates, is coupled with an improper depiction in the popular cultural environment. Gates is disturbed not only by the representation of blacks on television—“a very poor index to our social advancement or political progress,” he wrote in the New York Times —but also by blacks’ attitudes toward education and athletics. “Imbued with a belief that our principal avenue to fame and profit is through sport, and seduced by a win-at-any-cost system that corrupts even elementary school students, far too many black kids treat basketball courts and football fields as if they were classrooms in an alternative school system,” Gates wrote in Sports Illustrated. Education is crucial, Gates explained to V. R. Peterson in Essence, to combat damaging racial stereotypes and beliefs: “I find the lack of knowledge about Black people that Black people have distressing. What I think of as intellectual racism—the idea that Blacks are innately inferior—will be countered if each of us is an authentic scholar.”

But Gates decries any type of education that focuses on only one culture. He believes that schools set up to teach only an Afrocentric curriculum merely perpetuate racist cultural attitudes. “Bogus theories of ’sun’ and ’ice’ people, and the individual scapegoating of other ethnic groups, only resurrects the worst of 19th-century racist pseudoscience—which too many of the pharaohs of ’Afrocentrism’ have accepted without realizing,” Gates explained in Newsweek. He also condemns the belief that only blacks can teach or write about black culture. “I think that’s ridiculous,” he told Time’s Clarke and Tifft. “It’s as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn’t appreciate [writer William] 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.”

In Time magazine Robert Hughes once described America as “a place filled with diversity, unsettled histories, images impinging on one another and spawning unexpected shapes. Its polyphony of voices, its constant eddying of claims to identity, is one of the things that makes America America.” For this to continue, Gates believes, it is imperative that there is tolerance and understanding across cultural lines: “The challenge facing America will be the shaping of a truly common public culture, one responsive to the long-silenced cultures of color,” he declared in the New York Times. “If we relinquish the ideal of America as a plural nation, we’ve abandoned the very experiment America represents.”

Selected writings

Author

(With James Gibbs and Ketu H. Katrak) Wole Soyinka: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources, Greenwood Press, 1986.

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.

Editor

Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Charles T. Davis’s Essays on Black Literature and Culture, 1942-1981, Garland Publishing, 1982.

Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches From the Life of a Free Black, Random House, 1983.

Black Literature and Literary Theory, Methuen, 1984.

(With Charles T. Davis) The Slave’s Narrative: Texts and Contexts, Oxford University Press, 1985.

“Race,” Writing, and Difference, University of Chicago Press, 1986.

The Classic Slave Narratives, New American Library, 1987.

The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, thirty volumes, Oxford University Press, 1988.

(With others) The Norton Anthology of Afro-American Literature, Norton, 1990.

Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Literary Critical Anthology, New American Library, 1990.

Three Classic African-American Novels, Random, 1990.

(With George H. Bass) Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Mule Bone: A Comedy of Negro Life, HarperCollins, 1991.

Bearing Witness: Selections from 150 Years of African-American Autobiography, Pantheon, 1991.

Contributor

Herbert Sacks, editor, The Book of Hurdles, Atheneum, 1978.

Robert Stepto and Dexter Fisher, editors, Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, Modern Language Association of America, 1979.

William H. Robinson, editor, Critical Essays on Phyllis Wheatley, G. K. Hall, 1982.

Guy C. McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940, Bedford Arts, 1991.

Also contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals and journals, including Antioch Review, Black American Literature Forum, Black World, Critical Inquiry, New York Times, New York Times Book Review, Southern Review, and Yale Review. Member of board of editors of American Quarterly, Black American Literature Forum, Cultural Critique, Proteus, and Studies in American Fiction; member of board of directors of Critical Inquiry and Diacritics; advisory editor to Contributions to African and Afro-American Studies and Studies on Black Life and Culture.