GATES, HENRY LOUIS, JR.

born Sept. 16, 1950, Keyser, W.Va., U.S. Gates American critic and scholar known for his pioneering theories of black literature. He used the term signifyin' to represent African and African-American literary history as a continuing reflection and reinterpretation of what had gone before. Gates was at the forefront of the discovery and restoration of many lost works by black writerssuch as Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859), the earliest known novel by a black Americanand he argued in Loose Canons (1992) and elsewhere for the inclusion of African-American literature in the Western canon. Gates visited Africa on a fellowship in 1970 and 1971, staying on to work as a hospital anesthetist in Tanzania, then traveling through 15 African nations. In 1973 he entered Yale University and earned an M.A. (1974) and a Ph.D. (1979) in English. He then undertook advanced studies at Clare College, Cambridge, where his tutor was the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. Persuaded by Soyinka to study literature rather than history, Gates also learned much from him about Yoruba culture. Gates later taught at several American universities, including Yale, Cornell, and Harvard, where he was appointed W.E.B. Du Bois professor of humanities in 1991. Gates's theory of signifyin' traced black Caribbean and American culture back through the talking bookthe central method for recording slave narrativesand the early signifying monkey storyteller to Esu, the trickster figure of the West African Yoruba. Black culture, Gates held, maintained an ongoing dialogue, often humorous, insulting, or provocative, with what had preceded it, and all works of black writers had to be seen in that context. Gates's fullest exposition of signifyin' was found in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self (1987) and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), in which he elaborated how signifyin' informed the interconnected work of Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker. He applied his theory to many texts, including those of Soyinka, the slave narratives, Frederick Douglass, black periodical fiction of 18211919, and the 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley.