Signifyin'

Abstract: This article explores the use of the Black American cultural tradition of “signifyin’” as a means of performing racial identity online. In the United States, race is deeply tied to corporeal signifiers. But, in social media, the body can be obscured or even imitated (e.g., by a deceptive avatar). Without reliable corporeal signifiers of racial difference readily apparent, Black users often perform their identities through displays of cultural competence and knowledge. The linguistic practice of “signifyin’,” which deploys figurative language, indirectness, doubleness, and wordplay as a means of conveying multiple layers of meaning, serves as a powerful resource for the performance of Black cultural identity on Twitter.

Abstract: Confluences looks at the prospects for and the potential rewards of breaking down theoretical and disciplinary barriers that have tended to separate African American and postcolonial studies. John Cullen Gruesser's study emphasizes the confluences among three major theories that have emerged in literary and cultural studies in the past twenty-five years: postcolonialism, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Signifyin(g), and Paul Gilroy's black Atlantic. For readers who may not be well acquainted with one or more of the three theories, Gruesser provides concise introductions in the opening chapter. In addition, he urges those people working in postcolonial or African American literary studies to attempt to break down the boundaries that in recent years have come to isolate the two fields. Gruesser then devotes a chapter to each theory, examining one literary text that illustrates the value of the theoretical model, a second text that extends the model in a significant way, and a third text that raises one or more questions about the theory. His examples are drawn from the writings of Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Walter Mosley, Pauline Hopkins, Toni Morrison, Harry Dean, Harriet Jacobs, and Alice Walker. Cautious not to conflate postcolonial and African American studies, Gruesser encourages critics to embrace the black Atlantic's emphases on movement through space (routes rather than roots) and intercultural connections and to expand and where appropriate to emend Gilroy's efforts to bridge the two fields.

Abstract: Free of the white person's gaze, black people created their own unique vernacular structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white forms. Repetition and revision are fundamental to black artistic forms, from painting and sculpture to music and language use. I decided to analyze the nature and function of Signifyin(g) precisely because it is repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference. Whatever is black about black American literature is to be found in this identifiable black Signifyin(g) difference. That, most succinctly if ambiguously, describes the premise of this book. Lest this theory of criticism, however, be thought of as only black, let me admit that the implicit premise of this study is that all texts Signify upon other texts.... Perhaps critics of other literatures will find this theory useful as they attempt to account for the configurations of the texts in their traditions. Anyone who analyzes black literature must do so as a comparativist, by definition, because our canonical texts have complex double formal antecedents, the Western and the black. (Signifying) is the figure of the double-voiced. The Signifying Monkey ... seems to dwell in [the] space between two linguistic domains. --Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988, xxiv-xxv, 150) "Signifyin(g)" operates at three levels of increasing generalization and importance in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988). It is a theme in certain African-American literary works, a set of rhetorical strategies pervasively embodied in black American discourse, whether informal or formal, and "an indigenous black metaphor for intertextuality" all told (59), a trope by which to represent black literary culture's vernacular theorizing of itself. In setting out to Signify on Gates and other recent theorists of African-American literature, I certainly do not presume to have expertise in the thematics of that literary tradition; neither do I pretend to deep insight into indigenous black rhetorics. Rather I accept Gates's implicit invitation, in the first epigraph above, to gauge from a vernacular situation different from his the usefulness of his critical theory (and by extension that of other recent African-American theorizing). My Signifyin(g) and the theorizing that results from it will manifest my own vernacular as it intersects with other vernaculars. I make no presumptuous claim to blackness in my presentation, but at the same time I do not undervalue the potential dialogical richness of my interlocutions with African-American culture from a position outside it. The two most general aims of my Signifyin(g) will be (1) to outline the ways in which Gates's and other black observers' theorizing defines, with compelling clarity, issues crucial to the whole realm of postmodern theorizing in the human sciences and (2) to suggest the profits offered by theories such as Gates's to students of black musical traditions, specifically jazz. In informal black discourse Signifyin(g) connotes a variety of ways of speaking and interacting that are characterized by irony, indirection, needling, and trickery. It is not a particular subject matter but rather a group of related rhetorical practices that might be employed across many subjects. Similarly, the Signifying Monkey, the archetypal Signifier in African-American oral tradition, is not "engaged in the game of information-giving," as Gates says, so much as he is involved in the manipulation and mediation of others' information. Thus "one is signified upon by the signifier"; or again, "one does not signify something; rather, one signifies in some way" (52-54). Gates's emphasis on Signifyin(g) as a mediating strategy for discourse implies its interaction with things signified, its position between or among texts. This in turn leads him to employ it generally as a trope of repetition and revision. …