Wonders Of The African World With Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,.

Abstract

When Kenneth Clark did his monumental Civilisation series for the BBC some thirty years ago he subtitled it "A Personal View," which really amounts to an oxymoron, as if a survey of some two thousand years of western culture could be anything else. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., scholar-celebrity, chair of Harvard University's Afro-American studies program, director of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, MacArthur Foundation fellow, frequent contributor to the New Yorker magazine, and author of the award winning The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, recalls the influence that series had on a young and impressionable "Skip" Gates growing up in Piedmont, West Virginia.