Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950), popularly known by his childhood nickname "Skip", is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a trustee of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. He rediscovered the earliest known African-American novels and has published extensively on the recognition of African-American literature as part of the Western canon.
In addition to producing and hosting previous series on the history and genealogy of prominent American figures, since 2012, Gates has been host of the television series Finding Your Roots on PBS. The series combines the work of expert researchers in genealogy, history, and historical research in genetics to tell guests about the lives and histories of their ancestors.
Early life and education
Gates was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, to Pauline Augusta (née Coleman) Gates (1916–1987) and Henry Louis Gates Sr. (c. 1913–2010). He grew up in neighboring Piedmont. His father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor, while his mother cleaned houses.
Later in life, Gates learned through DNA analysis that his family is descended in part from the Yoruba people of West Africa. He also learned that he has 50% European ancestry, including Irish forebears; he was surprised his European ancestry turned out to be so substantial. Having grown up in an African-American community, however, he identifies as Black. He has learned that he is also connected to the multiracial West Virginia community of Chestnut Ridge people.
After graduating from Piedmont High School in 1968, Gates attended Potomac State College of West Virginia University for one year before transferring to Yale University, from which he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1973 with a B.A., summa cum laude, in history. Gates then became the first African American to be awarded a Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He sailed to England on the liner Queen Elizabeth 2 and used the fellowship to pursue graduate study in English literature at Clare College, Cambridge, receiving an M.A. degree in 1974 and a Ph.D. in 1979.
Career
After a month at Yale Law School, Gates withdrew from the program. In October 1975, he was hired by Charles 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 doctoral dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to associate professor in 1984. While at Yale, Gates mentored Jodie Foster, who majored in African-American Literature there and wrote her thesis on author Toni Morrison.
In 1984, Gates was recruited by Cornell University with an offer of tenure; Gates asked Yale whether the university would match Cornell's offer, but they declined. Gates accepted the offer by Cornell in 1985 and taught there until 1989.
Following a two-year stay at Duke University, he was recruited to Harvard University in 1991. At Harvard, Gates teaches undergraduate and graduate courses as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, an endowed chair he was appointed to in 2006, and as a professor of English. Additionally, he is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
As a literary theorist and critic, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions. He draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to analyze texts and assess matters of identity politics. As a Black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon. He has 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". In his major scholarly work, The Signifying Monkey, a 1989 American Book Award winner, Gates expressed what might constitute an African-American cultural aesthetic. The work extended application of the concept of "signifyin'" to analysis of African-American works. "Signifyin(g)" refers to the significance of words that is based on context, and is accessible to only those who share the cultural values of a given speech community. His work has 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, he does not advocate a "separatist" Black canon. Rather, he works for greater recognition of Black works and their integration into a larger, pluralistic canon. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition, but has envisioned a more inclusive canon of diverse works sharing 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.
Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes. He 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."
As a mediator between those advocating separatism and those believing in a Western canon, Gates has been criticized by both. Some critics suggest that adding Black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists say that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in his advocacy of integration of the canon. Gates has been criticized by John Henrik Clarke, Molefi Kete Asante, and Maulana Karenga, each of whom has been questioned by others in academia.
As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, a digital archive of Black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). 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 Ménil in Houston.
As a result of research he conducted as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates discovered Our Nig, written by Harriet E. Wilson in 1859 and thought to be the first novel written in the United States by an African American. Later, he acquired and authenticated the manuscript of The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, a novel from the same period that scholars believe may have been written as early as 1853. If that date is correct, it would have precedence as the first-known novel written in the United States by an African American. (Note: Clotel (1853) by William Wells Brown is recognized as the first novel published by an African-American author, but it was both written and published in London.) The Bondwoman's Narrative was first published in 2002 and became a bestseller.
As a prominent Black intellectual, Gates has concentrated on building academic institutions to study Black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social…