The section on theory seems very Yale-of-the-time in its strengths and flaws. The second part of the book seeks to use the theory of Signifying to explicate a series of texts – a set of slave narratives, and then several novels from the canon, by writers including Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed, and Tony Morrison. The connection from the African to African-American tradition comes via the still-told folktale of the “Signifying Monkey”, in which a trickster Monkey outwits a braggart Lion. Gates connects the origin of these practices to West African religion – the trickster deity Esu-Elegbara, who mediates between other gods and humans through divination practices yielding cryptic messages for the seeker. Gates connects these oral traditions with artistic techniques of variation, parody and pastiche in Jazz and various other African-American art forms. The first part describes African-American traditions of conversational rhetoric – clever, indirect, often-competitive “Signifying” (the “dozens”, a traditional game of insult is a subset of Signifying.) Gates illustrates these traditions with examples and analysis from anthropologists, evaluating their explanations with his own experience as a native speaker.

The book is an attempt to create a theory of African-American literature based on African-American cultural traditions. Gates left Yale in ’85 as a rising star – eventually to build the African-American studies practice at Harvard – before I could take his class, but some of the ideas in the book were deja vu familiar to me from lectures in other classes on related topics. The Signifying Monkey, the major scholarly work of Henry Louis Gates, influential scholar of African-American literature, has long been a gap in my education.

Henry louis gates the signifying monkey