2014 Race & Pedagogy Conference Keynote & Spotlight Speakers: A Resource Guide: Henry Louis Gates Jr

Lively, accessible, and illustrated throughout, The African-American Century is a celebration of black achievement and a tribute to the black struggle for freedom in America that will inspire readers for years to come.

From an American Book Award-winning author comes a pungent and poignant masterpiece of recollection that ushers readers into a now-vanished "colored" world and extends and deepens our sense of African-American history, even as it entrances us with its bravura storytelling. From the Trade Paperback edition.

In a groundbreaking collaboration, and taking the great W.E.B. DuBois as their model, two of America's foremost African-American intellectuals address the dreams, fears, aspirations, and responsibilities of the black community--especially the black elite--on the eve of the 21st century.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., gives us a sumptuously illustrated landmark book tracing African American history from the arrival of the conquistadors to the election of Barack Obama. Informed by the latest, sometimes provocative scholarship and including more than seven hundred images--ancient maps, fine art, documents, photographs, cartoons, posters.

Renowned scholars of African-American literature Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah have brought together reviews "drawn from newspapers and popular magazines to show Walker's accomplishments in the eyes of her literary contemporaries," writes Gates, along with a "range of scholarly response."" "

Critical Perspectives - Past and Present This first volume in the Amistad Literary Series analyses the work of Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Toni Morrison who is generally regarded to be the most formally sophisticated novelist in the history of African-American literature. Contributors include Margaret Atwood, Barbara Christian and John Irving.

"This is a book of stories," writes Henry Louis Gates, "and all might be described as 'narratives of ascent.'" As some remarkable men talk about their lives, many perspectives on race and gender emerge. For the notion of the unitary black man, Gates argues, is as imaginary as the creature that the poet Wallace Stevens conjured in his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."

The Signifying Monkey is the first book of literary criticism to trace the roots of contemporary Black literature to Afro-American folklore and to the traditions of African languages. As the author examines the ancient poetry of the Ifa Oracle (found in Nigeria, Benin, Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti), he uncovers the origins of a sacred system of divination, brought to America by black slaves who felt it to be the very "heart-beat" of their souls. Gates demonstrates how a heroic and popular character called the Signifying Monkey emerged from this divination and came to pervade Afro-American culture. In providing masterful readings of literary works by Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Ishmael Reed--and in defining how the works of these authors "signify upon" each other--the author delivers a powerful and ground-breaking work of critical theory. Many previously unpublished tales about the Monkey, as well as those already published, are collected in a detailed appendix.