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The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader
Educator, writer, critic, intellectual, film-maker-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has been widely praised as being one of America's most prominent and prolific scholars. In what will be an essential volume, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Reader collects three decades of writings from his many fields of interest and expertise.
From his earliest work of literary-historical excavation in 1982, through his current writings on the history and science of African American genealogy, the essays collected here follow his path as historian, theorist, canon-builder, and cultural critic, revealing a thinker of uncommon breadth whose work is uniformly guided by the drive to uncover and restore a history that has for too long been buried and denied.
An invaluable reference, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Reader will be a singular reflection of one of our most gifted minds.
From his earliest work of literary-historical excavation in 1982, through his current writings on the history and science of African American genealogy, the essays collected here follow his path as historian, theorist, canon-builder, and cultural critic, revealing a thinker of uncommon breadth whose work is uniformly guided by the drive to uncover and restore a history that has for too long been buried and denied.
An invaluable reference, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Reader will be a singular reflection of one of our most gifted minds.
656 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2012
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238 people want to read
About the author
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
288 books857 followersHenry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 9, 2012
A lot of this book--his reviews of other works and criticism--did not interest me, but his personal essays on his childhood, his biographical data of several people and his work on DNA was fascinating. I do recommend this book to people interested in the subject
January 31, 2016
Mixed bag. Some of the articles are real treats, but there is a surprising amount of filler. I prefer his journalistic voice to the academic tone he occasionally takes. Clearly, if he had a position where he could lay aside the fluff, he has many good books and articles in him. The demands of Harvard require a falsity that holds back his perspicacity.
June 25, 2024
A COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTION OF THE WORKS OF THE HARVARD SCHOLAR
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born 1950) is a Professor as well as Director of African and African American Research at Harvard University. It is impossible to do justice to this broad and diverse collection (the only thing I would have added was his 1992 New York Times op-ed, ‘Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars’) within the confines of an Amazon review; so I will just highlight some of the parts I found most interesting.
Gates wrote in the Introduction to this 2012 collection of his writings, “For my entire reading and writing life, I have been driven mainly by two questions: Where are we? And How did we get here? These are the questions that unite all of the pieces contained in this reader… however different the sounds of the pieces may be, and whether I was writing about the African origins of literary significance or the narrative history of my family, I have been deeply concerned with and devoted to tracing roots. Over the course of my career, I have moved from exploring the roots of our literature to exploring the literal roots of our people… I now more often attempt to reconstruct the past by interpreting genealogical and historical documents…”
Of the 2008 Presidential election, he observes, “I wish we could say that Barack Obama’s election will magically reduce the numbers of teenage pregnancies or the level of drug addiction in the black community… [or] suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended up it, and that high school completion rates will become the best in the country… but I doubt that they will. But there is one thing we can proclaim today, without question: that the election of Barack Obama … means that ‘The Ultimate Color Line’ … has, at long last, been crossed. It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him.” (Pg. 42-43)
He explains, “In my efforts to trace present-day African Americans back to their family roots in Africa, I frequently consult what I consider to be one of the most valuable and impressive historical research tools ever created: the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. This database is a compilation of the records kept by shipping companies involved in the slave trade. It offers detailed information on 39, 941 transatlantic slave-trading voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866… The authors estimate that the assembled data cover at least two-thirds of the slaving voyages that crossed the Atlantic to the New World. According to the database, before the slave trade ended in the United States, approximately 455,000 Africans were brought here against their will… Meaning that of the 12.5 million Africans taken … in slavery, only a tiny portion---less than 4 percent---were brought to this country (the remainder… went to the Caribbean and Latin America)… the vast majority of our African ancestors came to the United States as slaves between 1700 and 1820… The black presence is as old as America itself.” (Pg. 144-145)
He suggests, “William Bennett and Allan Bloom, the dynamic duo of the cultural right, have become the easy targets of the cultural left… And how tempting it is to juxtapose their ‘civilizing mission’ to the racial violence that has swept through … traditionally liberal northern institutions… Add to this the fact that affirmative action programs on campus have meanwhile become window dressing operations, necessary ‘evils’ maintained to preserve the fiction or racial fairness and openness, but deprived of the power to enforce their stated principles. When unemployment among black youth is 40 percent, when 44 percent of black Americans can’t read the front page of a newspaper… well, you look for targets close at hand. And yet there’s a real danger of localizing our grievances… and so giving too much credit to a few men who are really symptomatic of a larger political current.” (Pg. 151-152)
He recalls an encounter the Jacques Derrida: “At a dinner for four… Derrida had told me that he had supervised the work of African students in African philosophy… and indeed thought of himself as ‘an African,’ having been born in Algeria, and wondered why no one at Yale ever asked him about that. I almost fell off my chair. Derrida was a brother all this time, and who knew? That was all the opening I needed. I invited him on the spot to join me in seeing the latest Richard Pryor movie… Derrida laughed [at the movie] more than I did. Who could have imagined, reading those massively dense tomes of his, that Jacques Derrida himself would love some Richard Pryor?” (Pg. 289)
Of ‘Race, Writing, and Difference’ (published as a special 1985 issue of ‘Critical Inquiry’), he notes that “both ‘Playing in the Dark’ by [Toni] Morrison, and Cornel West’s ‘Race Matters’ can be seen as… valid critiques… reminding all of us who wanted to declare ‘race’ nothing more or less than socially constructed that surely the matter was far more complicated than that. And Morrison and West were right… We need to probe the limits of social-constructionist frameworks to account for physical realities---such as physiology---while we also need to interrogate the limits of genetic constructions, or models, to account for their social valences.” (Pg. 292)
He acknowledges, “My father and his father… were legendary in our family for scorning any sort of wistful romance with Africa… My father’s feeling… of complete and apparently unambivalent disconnection from African has a painfully long history among ‘African Americans’ (many of whom, if truth be told, have never grown comfortable with calling ourselves ‘black,’ let alone ‘African’)… “Than God for slavery,’ Richard Pryor would outrageously exclaim … at the end of a devastatingly humorous account of his first visit to Africa. He unwittingly summarized one persistent view among African Americans that no amount of wishful thinking or ‘political correctness’ can seem to wash away entirely, perhaps because its pedigree includes far too many distinguished black intellectuals.” (Pg. 416-417)
He states, “In 1987… a radical view was put forth by Martin Bernal in his controversial work ‘Black Athena,’ in which he asserts that the Greco-Roman past was distorted by Western historians who altered it to fit an ‘Aryan model,’ denying its African and Asiatic roots. Bernal, like many scholars, now contends that the growth of Western civilization owes a great deal to Asiatic and African worlds… that corrective impulse is not without its own perils… reactions to histories such as Trevor-Roper’s gave rise to a generation of apologists and cheerleaders for black Africa, who ignored anything that might reflect poorly upon Africa; that is, any history that would even inadvertently reinforce images of, say, illiteracy or lack of technological development… To elevate Africa above what height of achievement can be supported by dependable evidence would, in fact, be to demean the heritage that I claim to love so deeply.” (Pg. 430-431)
He points out, “This new presence and authority of blacks in cultural institutions, largely a result of affirmative action programs and the active recruitment of minorities, is unprecedented in American history. And signs of the cultural flowering that define a renaissance are everywhere… One reason for the newest renaissance is that the generation that integrated historically white institutions in the late sixties and early seventies has now, two decades later, returned to those very institutions to occupy positions of power and authority.” (Pg. 457)
He notes, “OyamO---who, like many more senior luminaries of the Black Arts scene… recalls that the Harlem theatre’s high-flown airs were accompanied by paltry audiences. ‘There was a condescending attitude toward this community, buttressed by the fact that it was getting five hundred grand from the Ford Foundation every year…’ … These [theater] companies do provide a textbook example of who quickly beneficence becomes entitlement, and patronage a paycheck. And so the dirty little secret of the Black Arts movement was that it was a project promoted and sustained largely by the Ford Foundation.” (Pg. 529)
He explains, “I have to confess that the use of ‘ax’ for ‘ask’ has always been, for me, the linguistic equivalent of fingernails’ scraping down a blackboard… Don’t get me wrong: it’s not as if the black citizens … spoke the King’s English, but axing was something we did in the woods… Professor [William] Labov argues that black Americans have become more monolingual since the ‘60s---that fewer of them have a mastery of standard English. That’s the result of residential segregation… But it’s also compounded by … separating the black poor and the black middle class. Because of these two factors, there’s now a large group of poor black people whose face-to-face conversations are almost entirely with people like themselves…. Is that still true? The black vernacular seems to be everywhere these days… Even as large numbers of black children struggle with standard English, hip-hop has become the recreational lingua franca of white suburban youth… Is it possible … that white folk have come to speak ‘black’ far better than blacks speak ‘white’? Just axing.” (Pg. 542-543)
In his controversial essay, ‘Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,’ he says, “The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible… Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men…. The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
“The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against reparation schemes for the freed slaves… To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists… succeeded in banning the importation of slaves… But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time… Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.” (Pg. 547-549)
This book should be “must reading” for anyone wanting a broad and diverse selection of Gates’ writings.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born 1950) is a Professor as well as Director of African and African American Research at Harvard University. It is impossible to do justice to this broad and diverse collection (the only thing I would have added was his 1992 New York Times op-ed, ‘Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars’) within the confines of an Amazon review; so I will just highlight some of the parts I found most interesting.
Gates wrote in the Introduction to this 2012 collection of his writings, “For my entire reading and writing life, I have been driven mainly by two questions: Where are we? And How did we get here? These are the questions that unite all of the pieces contained in this reader… however different the sounds of the pieces may be, and whether I was writing about the African origins of literary significance or the narrative history of my family, I have been deeply concerned with and devoted to tracing roots. Over the course of my career, I have moved from exploring the roots of our literature to exploring the literal roots of our people… I now more often attempt to reconstruct the past by interpreting genealogical and historical documents…”
Of the 2008 Presidential election, he observes, “I wish we could say that Barack Obama’s election will magically reduce the numbers of teenage pregnancies or the level of drug addiction in the black community… [or] suddenly make black children learn to read and write as if their lives depended up it, and that high school completion rates will become the best in the country… but I doubt that they will. But there is one thing we can proclaim today, without question: that the election of Barack Obama … means that ‘The Ultimate Color Line’ … has, at long last, been crossed. It has been crossed by our very first postmodern Race Man, a man who embraces his African cultural and genetic heritage so securely that he can transcend it, becoming the candidate of choice to tens of millions of Americans who do not look like him.” (Pg. 42-43)
He explains, “In my efforts to trace present-day African Americans back to their family roots in Africa, I frequently consult what I consider to be one of the most valuable and impressive historical research tools ever created: the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. This database is a compilation of the records kept by shipping companies involved in the slave trade. It offers detailed information on 39, 941 transatlantic slave-trading voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866… The authors estimate that the assembled data cover at least two-thirds of the slaving voyages that crossed the Atlantic to the New World. According to the database, before the slave trade ended in the United States, approximately 455,000 Africans were brought here against their will… Meaning that of the 12.5 million Africans taken … in slavery, only a tiny portion---less than 4 percent---were brought to this country (the remainder… went to the Caribbean and Latin America)… the vast majority of our African ancestors came to the United States as slaves between 1700 and 1820… The black presence is as old as America itself.” (Pg. 144-145)
He suggests, “William Bennett and Allan Bloom, the dynamic duo of the cultural right, have become the easy targets of the cultural left… And how tempting it is to juxtapose their ‘civilizing mission’ to the racial violence that has swept through … traditionally liberal northern institutions… Add to this the fact that affirmative action programs on campus have meanwhile become window dressing operations, necessary ‘evils’ maintained to preserve the fiction or racial fairness and openness, but deprived of the power to enforce their stated principles. When unemployment among black youth is 40 percent, when 44 percent of black Americans can’t read the front page of a newspaper… well, you look for targets close at hand. And yet there’s a real danger of localizing our grievances… and so giving too much credit to a few men who are really symptomatic of a larger political current.” (Pg. 151-152)
He recalls an encounter the Jacques Derrida: “At a dinner for four… Derrida had told me that he had supervised the work of African students in African philosophy… and indeed thought of himself as ‘an African,’ having been born in Algeria, and wondered why no one at Yale ever asked him about that. I almost fell off my chair. Derrida was a brother all this time, and who knew? That was all the opening I needed. I invited him on the spot to join me in seeing the latest Richard Pryor movie… Derrida laughed [at the movie] more than I did. Who could have imagined, reading those massively dense tomes of his, that Jacques Derrida himself would love some Richard Pryor?” (Pg. 289)
Of ‘Race, Writing, and Difference’ (published as a special 1985 issue of ‘Critical Inquiry’), he notes that “both ‘Playing in the Dark’ by [Toni] Morrison, and Cornel West’s ‘Race Matters’ can be seen as… valid critiques… reminding all of us who wanted to declare ‘race’ nothing more or less than socially constructed that surely the matter was far more complicated than that. And Morrison and West were right… We need to probe the limits of social-constructionist frameworks to account for physical realities---such as physiology---while we also need to interrogate the limits of genetic constructions, or models, to account for their social valences.” (Pg. 292)
He acknowledges, “My father and his father… were legendary in our family for scorning any sort of wistful romance with Africa… My father’s feeling… of complete and apparently unambivalent disconnection from African has a painfully long history among ‘African Americans’ (many of whom, if truth be told, have never grown comfortable with calling ourselves ‘black,’ let alone ‘African’)… “Than God for slavery,’ Richard Pryor would outrageously exclaim … at the end of a devastatingly humorous account of his first visit to Africa. He unwittingly summarized one persistent view among African Americans that no amount of wishful thinking or ‘political correctness’ can seem to wash away entirely, perhaps because its pedigree includes far too many distinguished black intellectuals.” (Pg. 416-417)
He states, “In 1987… a radical view was put forth by Martin Bernal in his controversial work ‘Black Athena,’ in which he asserts that the Greco-Roman past was distorted by Western historians who altered it to fit an ‘Aryan model,’ denying its African and Asiatic roots. Bernal, like many scholars, now contends that the growth of Western civilization owes a great deal to Asiatic and African worlds… that corrective impulse is not without its own perils… reactions to histories such as Trevor-Roper’s gave rise to a generation of apologists and cheerleaders for black Africa, who ignored anything that might reflect poorly upon Africa; that is, any history that would even inadvertently reinforce images of, say, illiteracy or lack of technological development… To elevate Africa above what height of achievement can be supported by dependable evidence would, in fact, be to demean the heritage that I claim to love so deeply.” (Pg. 430-431)
He points out, “This new presence and authority of blacks in cultural institutions, largely a result of affirmative action programs and the active recruitment of minorities, is unprecedented in American history. And signs of the cultural flowering that define a renaissance are everywhere… One reason for the newest renaissance is that the generation that integrated historically white institutions in the late sixties and early seventies has now, two decades later, returned to those very institutions to occupy positions of power and authority.” (Pg. 457)
He notes, “OyamO---who, like many more senior luminaries of the Black Arts scene… recalls that the Harlem theatre’s high-flown airs were accompanied by paltry audiences. ‘There was a condescending attitude toward this community, buttressed by the fact that it was getting five hundred grand from the Ford Foundation every year…’ … These [theater] companies do provide a textbook example of who quickly beneficence becomes entitlement, and patronage a paycheck. And so the dirty little secret of the Black Arts movement was that it was a project promoted and sustained largely by the Ford Foundation.” (Pg. 529)
He explains, “I have to confess that the use of ‘ax’ for ‘ask’ has always been, for me, the linguistic equivalent of fingernails’ scraping down a blackboard… Don’t get me wrong: it’s not as if the black citizens … spoke the King’s English, but axing was something we did in the woods… Professor [William] Labov argues that black Americans have become more monolingual since the ‘60s---that fewer of them have a mastery of standard English. That’s the result of residential segregation… But it’s also compounded by … separating the black poor and the black middle class. Because of these two factors, there’s now a large group of poor black people whose face-to-face conversations are almost entirely with people like themselves…. Is that still true? The black vernacular seems to be everywhere these days… Even as large numbers of black children struggle with standard English, hip-hop has become the recreational lingua franca of white suburban youth… Is it possible … that white folk have come to speak ‘black’ far better than blacks speak ‘white’? Just axing.” (Pg. 542-543)
In his controversial essay, ‘Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,’ he says, “The historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University estimate that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders. The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible… Advocates of reparations for the descendants of those slaves generally ignore this untidy problem of the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men…. The truth, however, is much more complex: slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike.
“The African role in the slave trade was fully understood and openly acknowledged by many African-Americans even before the Civil War. For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against reparation schemes for the freed slaves… To be sure, the African role in the slave trade was greatly reduced after 1807, when abolitionists… succeeded in banning the importation of slaves… But the sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time… Given this remarkably messy history, the problem with reparations may not be so much whether they are a good idea or deciding who would get them; the larger question just might be from whom they would be extracted.” (Pg. 547-549)
This book should be “must reading” for anyone wanting a broad and diverse selection of Gates’ writings.
Read
July 26, 2013810.9896 G2593 2012
March 28, 2017
Some repetition but that's because of the nature of his writing (magazine and newspaper article). My favorite is his description of good and bad hair. I could so relate
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews