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“... anarchic the controversy is. And how far from being resolved, or even fully articulated. Henry Louis Gates, professor of English and chairman of Afro-American Studies at Harvard, has been one of the most articulate commentators on the subject. His first scholarly interest was the recovery and editing of ‘lost’ and ignored texts, primarily ...”

“... On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the unpublished manuscript of the ‘earliest known novel by a female African-American slave and probably the earliest known novel by a black woman anywhere ...”

“... lists like ‘Geniuses of Western Music’ written by people who evidently believed Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin did not exist. That tradition continues. Dylan Byers knows nothing of your work, and therefore your work must not exist. Here is the machinery of racism – the privilege of being oblivious to questions, of never having to ...”

“... is what makes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Walker’s terms, ‘sickly’. Henry Louis Gates Jr called it ‘the most reviled poem in African American literature’. It contributed to the view of readers in the 1960s and 1970s who, informed by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found ...”

“... troubled. Juneteenth is a set of fragments masquerading as a whole – a Frankenstein’s monster, Louis Menand called it in the New York Times – and the simple plot line that Callahan imposes for unifying effect violates the form Ellison imagined and failed to achieve in this disparate, untitled, unfinished work, several sections of which had already ...”

“... to the world: they beat out field chants with kitchen utensils (The Piano Lesson), do the ‘Joe Louis Victory Walk’ (Seven Guitars), perform voodoo to contact their drowned ancestors (Gem of the Ocean) and, of course, sing the blues. ‘White folks don’t understand about the blues,’ Ma Rainey says. ‘They hear it come out, but they don’t know how ...”

“... Eventually a younger generation of African-American scholars, prominent among them Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr, came round and paid respects to The Confessions of Nat Turner, and some even designated Styron the inadvertent father of the postmodern slave narrative, but by then he may have been so bruised by the ...”

“... of communal government at Acre which probably inspired his famous constitutional experiments under Henry III. Sir Steven Runciman began his three-volume History of the Crusades, one of the truly great examples of English narrative historiography, with the implied question: do we regard the Crusades ‘as the most tremendous and romantic of Christian adventures ...”

“... Corps of Engineers. His twenties were spent not in battle but damming the Mississippi above St Louis, reviewing blueprints in Washington and renovating Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. Only during the US invasion of Mexico did he see combat, and even then, as a staff officer, his job was reconnaissance and gun positions. Lee remained aloof from the partisan ...”

“... was,’ he writes, ‘a war of the same kind as those that England was later to wage against Louis XIV and Napoleon I, against Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler. It involved the whole of Western Europe as well as, indeed more than, the Atlantic and the Caribbean.’ One hesitates about accepting parallels with ‘wars of the same kind’. England’s ...”