Gates used his review of Arnold Rampersand's Langston Hughes biography to discuss a particularly heated topic in the '80s the canon. To publish criticism still feels like making a fresh inscription on a large tabula rasa. Whether African American scholarship's cure generating new canons would take or merely replace one affliction with another wasn't as pressing a concern. Faced with the fractured generational memory left by slavery, the black scholar welcomed the influences, the familial obligations. And in linking a historical canon with a literary tradition, Gates may have offered a way of dodging the anxieties that hobbled the mainstream academic.
History insists that one reckon with forefathers.
But more than this, Gates's words now have the look of a game plan, a strategy for pouring the foundation of collective cultural memory. Indeed, the proliferation of reference works, many of them encyclopedias, published since his 1989 VLS essay resembles nothing so much as the frenetic construction of an American boomtown. The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience . That a trained literary critic has become so central a figure to the dissemination of African American history makes sense. The Harvard Guide reminds us that DuBois was not only the university's first African American Ph.D., but also author of the first published monograph by its Historical Studies Association.