Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an educator, scholar, literary critic, writer, and the chair of Harvard's Afro-American Studies program. Gates earned a BA summa cum laude from Yale and a Ph.D. in English from Clare College, Cambridge University. After teaching at Yale, he was denied tenure, passed over in favor of the distinguished literary critic Robert Stepto . Gates and his frequent collaborator, Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, decamped to Cornell University, then to Duke University before settling at Harvard.
Gates has applied structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics. He hosted America Beyond the Color Line for PBS.
He originated the application of the concept of "signifyin(g)" to African-American literary criticism and history.
Books
- The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, winner of the American Book Award
- Black Literature and Literary Theory editor
- Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self
- Norton Anthology of African American Literature co-edited with Nellie Y. McKay.
- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man Vintage; Reprint edition (1998) ISBN 0679776664
He has also edited Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave.
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