Interview
with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Appalachian
Heritage Writer-in-Residency at
Recipient
of the 2007 Appalachian Heritage Writer’s Award
By Sylvia Bailey
Shurbutt and David O. Hoffman
S & D: There is an exuberance in your work, a wonderful,
positive enthusiasm that seems to have followed you from the beginning. Whether you carry any of the “baggage” or
guilt of an immensely successful man who happens to be African American is not
present in your writing. How much do you
think your particular background—growing up in a small town in West Virginia,
starting out at the nascent moment of crumbling social and racial barriers in
America, a time when hope still burned white hot, having the parents and the
community closeness that you write about in Colored
People—has to do with the distinctive outlook that you evince in your work.
HLG: I think
most of it has to do with my parents, who expected great things from both my
brother and me. They wouldn't accept anything less than our very best effort. I
was lucky to be born when I was, because a lot of opportunities were open to me
that were not open to, say, my father, who is himself a very intelligent and
driven man.
S & D: Despite your extraordinary accomplishments, you have
also received some criticism, from both the right and the left (which must mean that you are doing
quite a bit right)—from conservatives that you are too generous with
“loosening” the canon, from liberals that you are too accommodating to the
patriarchal, dominant white culture. How
do you respond to such criticism and what do you hope that your legacy to
scholarship and to the racial conversation might be?
HLG: I don't
respond! People write and speak with their own agenda, and because I've been
fortunate to have a public platform for many years (and especially since coming
to Harvard), I—or, more aptly, my views are an easy target.
I hope that my legacy to scholarship and the racial
conversation will be that African American literature, history, and culture—and
all of the achievements of our people—will be seen and understood as central,
not peripheral, to American literature, history, and culture.
S & D: You undertook quite an extraordinary adventure before
your junior year at Yale working at a mission hospital in
HLG: These
travels and experiences in
S & D: In an interview in 2002, you talked about the many
mentors—“a rainbow coalition of mentors”—that made a remarkable difference in
your own intellectual journey. Who were
some of the most significant and inspiring mentors for you as a young man? What about their encouragement was
particularly inspiring to you; what qualities in them helped you?
HLG: I've always had great, inspiring teachers, from
the time I was a little boy in
S & D: What is the importance of this kind of encouragement
and modeling for young people? What
about such a relationship inspires both the mentor and the mentee?
HLG:
Absolutely crucial; there's little that's more important. The student
gets a real sense of what is possible, and of how to get those ideas out; and
the teacher learns from the student how much more work there is to do.
S & D: As was often the case in the 70s and 80s, young Ph.D.
scholars were steered toward the traditional canon rather than being allowed to
pursue those non-canonical writers off the “academic” beaten track of the
time. Did you find any benefits from
being asked in graduate school somewhat to side-step your scholarly interests
by immersing yourself in the traditional canon (in your case, writing a
dissertation on European writers of the Enlightenment indirectly involved in
philosophic debate about slavery and race issues of the day)? What were the debits and/or benefits of such
an education?
HLG:
Tremendous benefits. I can't think of a single debit, to use your word.
We have to know what we're up against! Seriously, Africans (and other people of
color; I'm thinking of the indigenous peoples of the Americas specifically)
have been represented by European writers, philosophers, artists as
intellectually inferior, unreasonable, unrefined, purely physical and suited
only for brute labor—take your pick. Knowing the Western canon increases our knowledge about the
history and culture of black people. While African American literature, for
example, can stand on its own as literature, outside of its political or
historical context, why ask expect it to do so, when it was not created in an
apolitical or ahistorical vacuum, but in a world of Western ideas that sought
to deny its very existence?
S & D: Having been involved in developing both gender and
minorities courses and integrating these writers into our teaching, we are both
acutely aware of the arguments that we often hear about teaching such
specialized courses as Women’s Studies, Appalachian Cultural Studies, and
African American Studies—that these courses “ghettoize” the literature and the
writers, that mainstreaming is a more effective way to approach the teaching of
literature, etc. What is the essential
or kernel argument that you have offered when others have criticized the need
for such specialized programs and courses in the academy?
HLG: We’ve got
to have specialized courses, and we've got to have African American Studies
departments, Women's Studies department, for the foreseeable future because
mainstream scholarship is based on the idea that Shakespeare, Faulkner, Joyce
are the standards by which all other work is measured. There is the idea that
blacks, women, and other underrepresented groups in the arts are always
"writing against" something (even I used that phrase, somewhat
facetiously, in my answer to the previous question) instead of creating
something new. If we want to see the work of black writers and women writers as
valid in its own right and not as a subset of a "larger" field, then
we have to give them their own space, a room of their own, as it were. I hope
that this will not always be the case, but for now it is.
S & D: In 1991, you went to Harvard to chair the African
American Studies Department, literally transforming it from fledgling—perhaps
flailing—to the vibrant resource that it is today, a veritable “think tank” and
interdisciplinary resource for questions about race and African American
studies. How did you manage to do that?
HLG: No
university in this country, or maybe even the world, has the public platform
that Harvard has. That in itself was a powerful draw. And with the top people
in their fields assembled—Cornel West, Anthony Appiah, Larry Bobo, and later we
added William Julius Wilson, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Roland Fryer, and some
other tremendous junior faculty—we had strength in numbers, and we attracted a
lot of attention. And with the Du Bois Institute we had the ability to draw
scholars from all over the world and
S & D: You have such diverse professional interests: a love
for archives and archival research, administration of the African art database
and the photo archive at Harvard, administration of one of the premier African
American Studies programs in the country, teaching, writing, making
documentaries. How do you balance
these? How have you been able to
accomplish so much? Which among these
activities and responsibilities provide the most satisfaction?
HLG: At
different times, different activities have provided the greatest satisfaction.
Twenty years ago, when deconstruction and Marxism were all the rage in English
departments, it was tremendously satisfying to publish "The Signifying
Monkey" and see it alter the theoretical landscape. Now I wouldn't write a
book like that, because it's more important to me to reach people outside of
the academy as well as inside of it. I will say, though, there's nothing like
the thrill of discovery: to find Harriet Wilson's and Hannah Crafts's
manuscripts, and then to authenticate them and to realize that I had history in
my hands—well, that was beyond compare. And I've been blessed to have that
experience again with my more recent work in genealogy and DNA, in which I've
made so many startling discoveries, about my own family and about the lives of
African Americans in this country, in slavery and in freedom. So whether it's
archival work or inventive theoretical work, I guess what gives the greatest
satisfaction is discovering something new, and bringing it to wider attention.
And I should say that I've been very fortunate to have great colleagues,
researchers, and staff, who have made this juggling of activities possible.
S & D: We understand that you are interested as well in the
study of art and have yourself quite a collection of African art and
artifacts. We also note that you began as
a historian and then devoted your work to writing, literature, and literary
criticism. How important is the
interdisciplinary approach, in your estimation to teaching, writing and
scholarship?
HLG: Crucial.
As I said earlier, no work of art—visual, literary, what have you—exists in a
vacuum. If you look at artists, writers, filmmakers, and historians today,
they're all talking to each other, and they always were talking to each other. That's why we have
movements like the
S & D: Somewhere we read that you believe fully in the
concept of the “economy of scholarship,” whereby you connect your teaching to
your research. For example, you have
noted that your staple courses are on
the Harlem Renaissance, African American Women’s Writing, and the African
American Literary Tradition, all connected directly to major publications
and/or projects. This professional
approach seems wonderfully sensible to us, and it follows the “scholar-teacher”
ideal. What advice do you offer
to young scholars and teachers who would look to you as a model?
HLG: Teach
what you know best, and what you love. Design classes based on your current
research, and don't be afraid to change those as your research progresses. Students
know when you're engaged with your material, and they'll respond to that.
Survey courses are important, of course, and it's crucial that we feel invested
in those as well, for the sake of our students who are getting perhaps their
first introduction to a field (I still co-teach the undergraduate Introduction
to African American Studies, for example). So for survey courses, it is
essential to shake up the syllabus from time to time, just to keep your own
interest alive.
S & D: Within the context of the controversy concerning the
recent Don Imus case and the reaction against rap music, how would you weigh in
on this controversy today, particularly in light of your defense of free
speech, 2 Live Crew, and rap
musicians?
HLG: As
objectionable as his speech was, he's free to speak as he sees fit—just like
hip hop artists. But so are we, and it's our responsibility as thinking black
people to call a racist a racist, but also to let hip hop artists and, more
importantly, the vast audience for hip hop—both white and black—know that we're
not all in the same camp on their views with respect to women, violence, drugs,
etc. A chief problem for the black community is that it tends to be viewed as a
monolith, rather than as a collection of individual voices and beliefs. Right
now, hip hop offers a compelling view of black culture—compelling because as
human beings we're drawn to stories of danger, violence, and all-around
"bad" behavior. But it's not necessarily accurate for all of us, and
it's certainly not the only story out there.
S & D: We have been struck by the fact that you yourself
seem to possess a “double voice,” not so much in the literary sense that you
speak of in The Signifying Monkey and
Figures in Black, but in the sense
that you appear to have found the secret to walking gracefully in both the
Black and the White worlds, in being able to transcend your racial self, to
view both Black and White in terms of “disinterestedness” (in the Victorian or
19th-century sense of that word).
A few others have been able to
accomplish this trick—Barack Obama, Ophra Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton,
Tiger Wood. For someone who writes
predominantly about race, how did you come by or cultivate this sense of
transcending race, this comfort zone with different races and classes? How have you managed to avoid the “racial
baggage” that so many of the rest of us carry?
HLG: I don't
think I've transcended race or that I've avoided carrying "racial
baggage." I'm a black man, and that's the lens I tend to view the world
through. However, I live in a world where not everyone is black; in fact, most
of the people in my professional world are white. I've tended to approach most
people as both teacher and student: I have things to teach, but also a lot to
learn. So it's always been important to me that I can communicate with anyone I
cross paths with.
S & D: You’ve written of the closeness of your family, a
traditional characteristic in the Appalachian family as well as the African
American family. Can you recall any
defining moment growing up with your family in Piedmont that inspired the way
you live your life today?
HLG: I don't
think there was one defining moment! My book "Colored People," which
I am deeply honored to know was selected
for the "One Book, One West Virginia" reading program,
recounts many defining moments. If I can reshape the question, I would say that
the example my parents set for me—my father's industry and tirelessness, and my
mother's dedication to making sure her sons worked hard!—were, and still are,
the most defining and inspiring facets of my life.
S & D: What are your next scholarly or writing projects?
HLG: I'm in
the midst of filming "African American Lives 2" for PBS, the
follow-up series to "African American Lives" and "Oprah's
Roots," in which we trace the ancestry back to Africa of several numerous
African Americans, this time including Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner, Dave
Chappelle, and Beyoncé. Our goal for the series is to show "ordinary"
African Americans as well that advances in DNA science and genealogical
research have opened up tremendous opportunities for us to learn about who we
are and where we came from. To this end,
we are profiling one "ordinary family" in the series, a feature of
the show that I think will be immensely rewarding. I am also working on a few
other documentary projects surveying the history of Africans in America. I
don't want to be more specific than that right now!