Issue of
September 30, 1998
 
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Henry Louis Gates
first speaker as arts, humanities lectures resume
BY DIANE MANUEL
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the
W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities at Harvard
University, will launch the second year of the Stanford
Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and
Arts with a public lecture at 7 p.m. Monday, Oct. 12, in
Kresge Auditorium.
Gates also will sign
copies of his books at the Bookstore at 4 p.m. on Oct. 12
and participate in a discussion from 4 to 6 p.m. Tuesday,
Oct. 13, at the Humanities Center Annex.
All events are free and
open to the public.
Related
Information:
The presidential lecture
series is designed to bring distinguished scholars,
artists and critics to campus. Funded by the President's
Office, the events are part of President Gerhard Casper's
plan to strengthen and revitalize the humanities and arts
at Stanford by exploring new roles and relationships for
the humanities and arts in the academic community on the
brink of the 21st century.
Last year's speakers were
the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, architect Peter
Eisenman, French playwright Helene Cixous and critic
Harold Bloom. Speakers scheduled to speak in fall
quarter, in addition to Gates, are the following:
- Stephen Jay Gould,
the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and
Professor of Geology at Harvard University, on
Nov. 4 and 5.
- Karl Heinz Bohrer,
professor for modern German literary history at
the University of Bielefeld, on Nov. 9 and 10.
- Wole Soyinka, the
Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1986, on Nov. 30
and Dec. 1.
Additional speakers for
winter, spring and fall quarters 1999 are Fredric
Jameson, Alexander Nehamas, Jean Starobinski, Jacques
Derrida, Stefan Maul, Pina Bausch, Svetlana Alpers and
Umberto Eco.
"The website the library is doing is just beautiful and we now have
the pages up for the first two lectures in the
fall," says Hans Gumbrecht, the Albert GuÚrard
Professor of Literature and director of the series.
"In this second year of the series we're also
hosting symposia to address the relationship between the
humanities and sciences and we plan to have some special
events, too. For example, we'd like to try to bring
Kasparov, the world chess champion, to campus to play
against Deep Blue."
The four symposia are as
follows:
- "Cosmologies and
World Views," with faculty from the
humanities and sciences. Feb. 19-20, 1999.
- "Limits of
Performance," with faculty from the
humanities, medicine and athletics. May 7-9,
1999.
- "Past-Dependencies,"
with faculty from the humanities and social
sciences. Nov. 5-6, 1999.
- c "Special
Effects," with faculty from the humanities
and engineering. Feb. 11-12, 2000.
Leading off the lecture
series this fall, Gates will speak about "Race and
Class/Race in Class." As chair of the Afro-American
Studies Department at Harvard and head of the
university's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American
Research, he is a scholar of black literature, culture
and history and an advocate for the place of African
American studies in the academy. A prolific author,
Gates' books include Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Black Man, a compilation of profiles of prominent
black men; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of
Afro-American Literary Criticism, which won the 1989
American Book Award; Colored People: A Memoir,
which won the Chicago Tribune's 1994 Heartland
Award; and The Future of the Race.
Gates also is a staff
writer for The New Yorker and produces about six
profiles for the magazine each year. He has written about
authors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and
Anatole Broyard; retired Army general Colin Powell;
Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; entertainer Harry
Belafonte; Red Cross head Elizabeth Dole; and First Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Gates currently is working
with Harvard colleague Kwame Anthony Appiah and Microsoft
on a CD-ROM, Encarta Africana, which he describes
as covering history "from early humans in Africa
millions of years ago to today, from Lucy to rap
music." A reference work on Africa and people of
African descent, content ranges from virtual tours of
Harlem and Senegal to performances by Duke Ellington and
Whoopi Goldberg. It will be released in February for $50
retail.
Before joining the Harvard
faculty in 1991, Gates had taught at Yale, Cornell and
Duke. Since then he has recruited a number of leading
scholars to his department, including philosopher Cornel
West, sociologist William Julius Wilson, historian Evelyn
Brooks Higginbotham and philosopher and novelist Kwame
Anthony Appiah.
"Despite the fact
that some have criticized him and the other members of
the Harvard 'dream team' in African American studies for
overly promoting themselves, I think that he has made a
positive contribution to the field through his
activities," says Clayborne Carson, professor of
history and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers
Project at Stanford.
"I worked closely
with him on a national committee to deal with problems in
black-Jewish relations and found him to be extremely
generous and an easy person to work with. I wish that
Stanford had recruited him when he was available; even
more, I hope that Stanford will recognize the need to
devote sufficient resources to build a comparable program
here in the African American field."
Sandra Drake, associate
professor of English, praises Gates' "invaluable
contributions to U.S. intellectual life through his
contributions to African American studies," citing
his "theorization of African American literary
traditions," his research "aimed at
recuperation of early African American writing" and
his encouragement of other scholars of African american
literature.
"My hopes for the
dialogue his talk at Stanford might provoke include
further explorations of literary theory and the
infrastructure of African-American writing," Drake
says. "I would like to hear Professor Gates'
thoughts on affirmative action and how attacking
affirmative action relates to other attacks on the
African American community in the society."
Recalling a reading Gates
did from Colored People: A Memoir during his last
visit to Palo Alto, Horace Porter, associate professor of
English, calls the Harvard scholar "an engaging and
witty speaker."
"He is a true
rarity," Porter adds. "He is a leading scholar
and editor in African American studies, as well as a
prolific and controversial commentator on American
cultural studies."
Given the focus on the
future of the humanities and arts in higher education for
the lecture series, Gumbrecht says Gates is
"specifically important" to the discussion.
"He is someone who
has really changed his own discipline," he adds.
"He has given African American studies an
interdisciplinary complexity, and the Du Bois Institute
has become a model for reform and rethinking of more
traditional disciplines." SR
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