structure” (43) so that black works received re-
spect as a literature in contrast to being treated as
cultural tourism or literary anthropology. Perhaps
Gates’s most famous work, The Signifying Monkey:
A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism is
considered a central theoretical and critical text.
Signifying Monkey traces and analyzes the African
notion of interpretation in the figure of Esu-Eleg-
bara, a mythological trickster.
Gates has received honorary degrees from
several universities, prestigious scholarships and
fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship,
and numerous awards for his writing, including
the 1989 American Book Award for Signifying
Monkey, the Lillian Smith Book Award (1994),
the George Polk Award for Social Commentary
(1993), the Golden Plate Achievement Award
(1993), and the Ainsfield-Wolf Book Award for
Race Relations (1989).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Spikes, Michael P. “Henry Louis Gates Jr.: African
American Studies.” In Understanding Contempo-
rary American Literary Theory, 44–68. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
Kim Hai Pearson
Brian Jennings
Gayle, Addison, Jr. (1932–1991)
Born in Newport News, Virginia, Gayle, a literary
scholar, critic, and biographer, is best known for
his effort to define, in his writings and speeches,
the BLACK AESTHETIC. After earning a B.A. in En-
glish from the City College of New York (1965),
Gayle pursued an M.A. in English at the Univer-
sity of California, Los Angeles. He was an eclectic
writer who published essays on various topics,
from the role of the black writer and literary critic
and the African-American literary tradition to
education and the African-American struggle for
human rights.
In 1972, Gayle’s editing of The Black Aes-
thetic placed him in the vanguard of the effort by
black writers, scholars, and critics to move away
from a Eurocentric definition of art and litera-
ture and create a clearly defined black aesthetic.
This groundbreaking text included essays by such
leading scholars and writers as HOYT W. FULLER,
MAULANA KARENGA, AMIRI BARAKA (LeRoi Jones),
SARAH WEBSTER FABIO, LARRY NEAL, ISHMAEL REED,
DARWIN T. TURNER, and many others who were
engaged in constructive debates (not consensus)
about the ideological basis for studying and pro-
ducing African-American literature. In his in-
troduction, Gayle argues that “The serious black
artist of today is at war with the American society”
(xvii). Unlike the writers of RICHARD WRIGHT’s
generation, who waged a war “against the soci-
etal laws and mores that barred them from equal
membership,” Gayle noted, the proponents of a
black aesthetics were engaged in a war that “is a
corrective—a means of helping black people out
of the polluted mainstream of Americanism”; this
war, he concluded, “will determine the future of
black art” (xxii–xxiii).
Gayle’s collected work includes the anthol-
ogy Black Expression: Essays by and about Black
Americans in the Creative Arts (1969), The Way of
the New World (1975), Oak and Ivy: A Biography
of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1971), Claude McKay:
The Black Poet at War (1972), and Richard Wright:
Ordeal of a Native Son (1980). He also published
two autobiographical texts, The Black Situation
(1970), which records his involvement in the
CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, and Wayward Child: A
Personal Odyssey (1977).
Equally significant is the lecture Gayle de-
livered, along with several other leading Afri-
can-American literary critics, in August 1971, at
Cazenovia College, in which he outlined the role
of the African-American writer and critic. In it, he
argued that, in their work, black critics and writers
have an enormous responsibility to the masses of
African Americans to reflect accurately the experi-
ence of blacks living in the United States. Stating
that “objectivity in the area of literary criticism
is impossibility,” Gayle outlined some of the key
concerns he would continue to address through-
out his work, and he argued that literature is more
than a mechanical form or a system of norms. The
African-American critic who buys into the notion
that universal norms shape great literature, Gayle200 Gayle, Addison, Jr.