Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self

by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

For over two centuries, critics and the black community have tended to approach African-American literature as simply one more front in the important war against racism, valuing slave narratives and twentieth-century works alike, primarily for their political impact.
In this volume, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a leading scholar in African-American studies, attacks the notion of African-American literature as a kind of social realism. Insisting, instead, that critics focus on the most repressed element of African-American criticism--the language of the text--Gates advocates the use of a close, methodical analysis of language, made possible by modern literary theory. Throughout his study, Gates incorporates the theoretical insights of critics such as Bakhtin, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, and Bloom, as he examines the modes of representation that define black art and analyzes the unspoken assumptions made in judging this literature since its inception.
Ranging from the eighteenth-century poet, Phillis Wheatley, to modern writers, Ishmael Reed and Alice Walker, Gates seeks to redefine literary criticism itself, moving away from a Eurocentric notion of a hierarchical canon--mostly white, Western, and male--to foster a truly comparative and pluralistic notion of literature.

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.

Reviews

[Trevor Seigler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good literary theory text from Henry Louis Gates Jr. (most well-known these days for his many specials on PBS about history and genealogy). I'm not going to say it's an easy read, but it's a fun read in many respects and a nice look at some different figures in African-American literature and their relation to the wider world of American literature. The essays on Jean Toomer and Phillis Wheatley were very good, and his essay on Ishamel Reed's "Mumbo Jumbo" make me want to revisit it soon.