ABSTRACT
Henry Louis Gates has achieved broad renown as a literary critic who writes widely on political, social, and cultural issues. His work shows an awareness of the network of understandings—traditional and topical, rational and charismatic—on which such a literary critical role must be grounded. Gates's anecdote shows the way in which signifying can be a figurative judo whereby the weight of a superior party's intention is turned against itself. Gates is primarily concerned with the aesthetic and therapeutic benefit made possible by spontaneous improvisation of story upon story in the African American literary tradition. In actual critical practice, Gates's literary discourse works—perhaps toward a reduction of the tensions of professional assimilation, but certainly not toward the intellectual and moral self-consciousness that could be achieved by a deeper rejection of those stereotypes and ideological forms to which his canonical strategies have sometimes tended.
