"It was as if I had thought all along I was a complete picture and he had revealed I was a puzzle and had taken me apart and put me back together again."

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You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.

— Henry Louis Gates