Who is Dr.Henry Gates.

Aripul Hoque

Dr.Henry Gates

-Dr.Henry Gates is a

Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, as well as director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.


- "I wanted to bring this lost African world into the consciousness of the larger public, black and white," says Gates, chair of Afro-American studies at Harvard and director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research. "It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art." (link to site)

-"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."