henry louis gates jr the signifying monkey

It has been a remarkable journey from the mill town of Piedmont, West Virginia, where Gates grew up. I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time-but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.' 'Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? So I'm divided. 'I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me,' he once wrote in an open letter to his daughters. Through all the work runs the dichotomy of race. They are the corollary of a teaching career that has taken him from Yale to Cornell to Duke to Harvard.

His projects travel with him in many instances. Gates's latest effort is a multimedia digital encyclopedia of African culture, Encarta Africana. For twenty years he and his colleagues have gathered fragments of a culture, amassing more than forty thousand texts for the Black Periodical Literature Project and enough material for fifty-two volumes on African American Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century for the Schomburg Center in New York. He has unearthed old periodicals, edited dictionaries and anthologies, and written a dozen books. Gates, this year's Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities, has been untiring in his quest. 'I've always thought of myself as both a literary historian and a literary critic,' says Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 'someone who loves archives and someone who is dedicated to resurrecting texts that have dropped out of sight.'

Henry louis gates jr the signifying monkey