Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair of Afro-American Studies, and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. In 1997 he was listed among Time magazine's '25 Most Influential Americans'. Gates' publications include Figures in Black (OUP, 1987), The Signifying Monkey (OUP, 1988), Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (Random House, 1997), Wonders of the African World (Knopf, 1999), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (Perseus, 1999), and The African American Centu...