Henry Louis Gates

Africana : the encyclopedia of the African and African American experience

A landmark in reference publishing, Africana is an incomparable one-volume encyclopedia of the black world - a vital resource for families, students, and educators everywhere.. Inspired by the dream of the late African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and assisted by an eminent advisory board, Harvard scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah have created the first scholarly encyclopedia to take as its scope the entire history of Africa and the African Diaspora. This single-volume reference includes more than three thousand articles and over two million words. With entries ranging from affirmative action to zydeco, from each of the most prominent ethnic groups in Africa to each member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana brings the entire black world into sharp focus. Every concise, informative article is referenced to others with the aim of guiding the reader through such wide-ranging topics as the history of slavery; the civil rights movement; African-American literature, music, and art; ancient African civilizations; and the black experience in countries such as France, India, and Russia. }Inspired by the dream of the late African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and assisted by an eminent advisory board, Harvard scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah have created the first scholarly encyclopedia to take as its scope the entire history of Africa and the African Diaspora.Beautifully designed and richly illustrated with over a thousand images - maps, tables, charts, photographs, hundreds of them in full color - this single-volume reference includes more than three thousand articles and over two million words. The interplay between text and illustration conveys the richness and sweep of the African and African American experience as no other publication before it. Certain to prove invaluable to anyone interested in black history and the influence of African culture on the world today, Africana is a unique testament to the remarkable legacy of a great and varied people. With entries ranging from affirmative action to zydeco, from each of the most prominent ethnic groups in Africa to each member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Africana brings the entire black world into sharp focus. Every concise, informative article is referenced to others with the aim of guiding the reader through such wide-ranging topics as the history of slavery; the civil rights movement; African-American literature, music, and art; ancient African civilizations; and the black experience in countries such as France, India, and Russia.More than a book for library reference, Africana will give hours of reading pleasure through its longer, interpretive essays by such notable writers as Stanley Crouch, Gerald Early, Randall Kennedy, and Cornel West. These specially commissioned essays give the reader an engaging chronicle of the religion, arts, and cultural life of Africans and of black people in the Old World and the New. }

Harlem on Our Minds

The real fever of love for the place will begin to take hold upon him. The subtle, insidious wine of New York will begin to intoxicate him. Then, if he is wise, he will go away, any place-yes, he will even go over to Jersey. But if he be a fool, he will stay and stay on until the town becomes all in all to him; until the very streets are his chums and certain buildings and corners his best friends. Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death. The Bowery will be his romance, Broadway his lyric, and the Park his pastoral, the river and the glory of it all his epic, and he will look down pityingly on all the rest of humanity. -PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

A CONVERSATION WITH CONDOLEEZZA RICE

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, thank you very much for granting me this interview. CONDOLEEZZA RICE: It’s a pleasure to be with you. GATES: How do you define a leader? RICE: A leader is someone who inspires others toward a common goal. The most important thing about leadership is to remember that you are trying to bring people together to achieve something. And none of us wants to be pushed and shoved in any particular direction, so if you treat the people that you’re leading with the same respect with which you would like to be treated, then I think you are a good leader. GATES: Are leaders chosen or are leaders made? RICE: I think leaders are made. I have never believed that anyone is born to anything. And leadership is also something that I think you get better at over time. In many experiences, as a younger person trying to lead a university or leading people, you make mistakes because you’re young and maybe a little too aggressive. I think leaders are not only made, but they get better at leading over time. GATES: Let’s talk about that idea with regard to your own upbringing. When I looked at your family pictures, I particularly noticed the way your parents looked at you. They seemed to be looking at someone who was going to be a major player, going to be a leader. Is that a self-fulfilling prophecy, do you think, the kind of reinforcement through self-esteem that is part of the air that you breathe? RICE: There is no doubt that without John and Angelina Rice, I would not have ended up where I did. I grew up in the segregated South where the messages could have been absolutely crushing, but somehow my parents made the messages about

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Encyclopedia Africana, 1909-63

In 1901, W.E.B. Du Bois, the African American intellectual and activist, conceived the idea of an encyclopedia Africana. He envisioned a scientific and comprehensive work on Africa and peoples of African descent that would refute the Enlightenment notion of blacks as devoid of civilization and the hallmarks of humanity. Du Bois stood in a tradition of earlier black works seeking to vindicate the race, but World War I and his move from academia to the NAACP postponed his efforts. In 1931, however, Du Bois participated in an encyclopedia project initiated by the Phelps-Stokes Fund. His writing during this period reveals his thinking about the nature and form a pan-African encyclopedia would take. Beset by rivalries and, primarily, lack of support from the established philanthropies, the project died. In 1960, shortly before his death, Du Bois was invited to Ghana to launch an encyclopedia. If any of these attempts had succeeded, the evolution of African and African American studies in the academy would have been significantly different.

Third World of Theory: Enlightenment’s Esau

Prologue: The Wright Stuff? Before Richard Wright sat the Third World of theory. It’s a Friday evening, 21 September 1956, the occasion of the First International Conference of Black Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne’s Amphitheâtre Descartes in Paris, now in its third day. In the audience is Aime Cesaire, Cheikh-Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Jean Price-Mars, Jacques Alexis, and Leopold-Sedar Senghor, just to begin a long and glorious roll call. With the conspicuous exception of W. E. B. DuBois, who was denied a passport by the U.S. State Department, here is assembled practically everymajor black critical thinker of the age.Here are the authors of Third World liberation, world-historic theorists of colonial resistance, forging new ideologies, new analyses, new “weapons of theory” out of negritude, Marxism, psychoanalysis, African communalism, you name it; remember, it’s 1956, and these are the heady days of grand theory for the black world. Never had the promise of a genuine politics of culture seemedmore real, more realizable. And before them stands Richard Wright. Two years shy of his fiftieth birthday, he’s bespectacled, wearing a three-piece suit, white shirt, hair close-cropped; the photograph’s a little fuzzy, but it’s easy to make out the familiar visages of postcolonial iconography. His presence, and his lecture, had been eagerly awaited.

Frederick Douglass’s Camera Obscura: Representing the Antislave “Clothed and in Their Own Form”

So now it seems to me that the arrival of such men as Toussaint if he is pure blood, or Douglas [sic] if he is pure blood, outweighs all the English & American humanity. The Antislavery of the whole world is but dust in the balance, a poor squeamishness & nervousness[;] the might & the right is here. Here is the Anti-Slave. . .now let them emerge, clothed and in their own form. —Emerson, Holograph, First Draft of Emerson’s “Emancipation of the Negroes in the West Indies,” 1844

TRIBUTES TO JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

When I was twenty, I decided to hitchhike across the African continent, more or less following the line of the Equator, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. I packed only one pair of sandals and one pair of jeans to make room for the three hefty books I had decided to read from cover to cover: Don Quixote , Moby Dick , and From Slavery to Freedom , by John Hope Franklin. I read the latter—the black and white bound third edition of the book—while recovering from a severe bout of amoebic dysentery sailing down the Congo River. It became such a valued reference for me that I kept it, for years, in the bookcase at my bedside.

African and African American Literature

Reply to Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. and introd. “African and African American Literature.” PMLA. 1990 Jan; 105(1): 7-184.