Henry Louis Gates\u2019 \u201cWhat\u2019s Love Got to Do with It?: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom\u201d is a critique of a criticism by Joyce Joyce, a well-lauded black female critic who wrote \u201cThe Black Canon.\u201d His criticism focuses on a woman\u2019s work, but his evidence almost entirely relies on men\u2019s criticism and literary writing. His connection to Africa through travel and scholarship combined with his appointment to a position named for one of what he feels to be the great African American legends cast this piece in an interesting light, suggesting the critic\u2019s concern for his own legacy.<\/p>\n
Gates came from a very working class background, but transitioned to elite institutions of learning. He went to a local junior college and left for Yale University bachelor\u2019s degree in history. After graduating, Gates transitioned into exploring Africa physically and academically. He took a leave of absence after graduating to travel through Africa, serving as an anesthetist in Tanzania. This fact, though unrelated to his later work, made me wonder if he was inspired by differences in treatment of black people in hospitals in America versus Africa. It has been documented that black people in America are often given lesser diagnoses and less pain medication, and I know that many minority scholars who travel to Europe or a country where they are the majority experience a significant shift in their sense of self.<\/p>\n
It seems clear that Gates\u2019 travel did impact him in some way because when he moved on to study at Cambridge University, he was under the tutelage of a Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is the one responsible for persuading Gates to study literature, for which he received a doctorate degree in 1979. He then taught at several institutions, including Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Harvard.<\/p>\n
At Harvard, he was appointed the W.E.B. du Bois Professor of the Humanities in 1991. This stuck out to me because in my source, Gates brings up Du Bois multiple times in mixed levels of praise and condemnation. He begins one section by saying that he is going to highlight the \u201csalient points\u201d of Joyce\u2019s piece, which he proceeds to undermine by saying that the first only reveals the stupidity of Joyce\u2019s student quoted in the article. He says of her reaction he deems faulty that any good teacher, including Du Bois, would have told Joyce\u2019s student, \u201cback to the text and told her to read it again\u201d (Gates 354). He goes on to refer to her as not a full teacher and suggests that her opinion that authors have failed to be clear to readers is in fact her own failing as a scholar.<\/p>\n
The next mention of Du Bois in the article is to refer to him as, \u201ca mediocre poet and a terrible<\/em> novelist\u201d (Gates 355). He does this in the part of his argument where he says Joyce is categorically wrong to say the best critics are creatives. In what I think is a clear move to align himself with Du Bois, Gates mocks the almost legendary figure, writing, \u201cDu Bois was probably the very first systematic literary and cultural theorist in the tradition. Rather, we genuflect<\/em> to Du Bois\u201d (355).<\/p>\n This fact about Gates\u2019 career really changed the way I perceived his treatment of Du Bois in the article. Clearly, Gates thinks highly of himself and his conclusions from his repeated totalitarian dismissal of any others as wrong or rather passive aggressively as \u201cmuddled\u201d (356). If Gates feels himself to be in the same group as Du Bois, it would explain more fully the extent to which he takes Joyce\u2019s criticism of respected critics so personally. She suggests that some black critics have attempted to assimilate into whiteness, and Du Bois repeatedly asks his audience if different things he does in his criticism make him \u201cless black.\u201d I am not suggesting that this is Gates\u2019 primary interest, but the article was written two years after he received that title, which might have put Du Bois in his mind as a predecessor or peer. It also seems to make him feel as though he can completely dismiss Joyce and many other ideas. Furthermore, his thoughts should be, as he phrased it, genuflected to. His piece\u2019s themes of \u201clegacy\u201d and \u201cintegrity\u201d and repeated defense of himself reflect a goal of legendary status he fears more intersectional criticism might upset. In this way, his response to a women’s criticism of black male writing is very familiar.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gates, Henry Louis. \u201c\u2018What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom.\u201d New Literary History<\/em>, vol. 18, no. 2, 1987, pp. 345\u2013362. JSTOR<\/em>, JSTOR, www.jstor.org\/stable\/468733.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica. \u201cHenry Louis Gates, Jr. Encyclopaedia Britannica<\/em>. Encylclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 24 Oct. 2014. https:\/\/www.britannica.com\/biography\/Henry-Louis-Gates-Jr.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Henry Louis Gates\u2019 \u201cWhat\u2019s Love Got to Do with It?: Critical Theory, Integrity, and the Black Idiom\u201d is a critique of a criticism by Joyce Joyce, a well-lauded black female critic who wrote \u201cThe Black Canon.\u201d His criticism focuses on a woman\u2019s work, but his evidence almost entirely relies on men\u2019s criticism and literary writing. … Continue reading Setting Oneself Up for Greatness and Setting Women Aside, Gates’ Quest for “Integrity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2965,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145910,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2017-blog-posts","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2965"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}