Gates

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. //The Signifying Monkey // (1988) > >  Analyzes rhetorical forms of Black English
 * Outspoken critic of the Euro-centric canon toc
 * Reviews sociolinguistic research that documents BEV as distinct and internally consistent dialect/version of English –not an incorrect version of SAE.
 * Language and culture are inseparable
 * Gates focuses on the distinctive qualities of black language and literature as an expression of black experience. Studies use of black language and communal behavior – rhetoric, not linguistics. Rhetoric of speech genres, literature, conversation, social interaction that enable cultural content
 * **Sees rhetoric as a connective force – tropes as cognitive and epistemic forms of language **
 * The signifying monkey (trickster) is folkloric character of Yoruba mythology. Messenger who mediated between gods and men by means of tricks. Stock stories, main one with Lion and Elephant
 * Signifying (the act of linguistic misdirection), ironically redirects the white word for the passive act of representation – Black rhetoric shows that representing meaning is not passive (is trickery?)
 * //The Signifying Monkey // articulates contention that Black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from western or European cultural traditions that express a “tone of deafness to the black cultural voice” and would result in “intellectual racism”
 * Does NOT want a separate canon
 * Geneva Smitherman – uses semantics to emphasize deep connection between language and the contexts of its development and use and to suggest that language must be studied in use – Gates turns to rhetoric and combines rhetoric with sociolinguistic analyses of black discourse.
 * <span style="background-color: #ffff00; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For Gates **<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">– rhetoric means tropes, but following Neitzsche and Derrida, Gates regards tropes as constitutive of language. **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**<span style="background-color: #ffff00; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Analyzes discourse form that black dialect speakers call “signifying” – treating it as a “master trope” of black rhetoric – embodies cultural meanings and represents a complex set of social interactions **<span style="background-color: #ffff00; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**<span style="background-color: #ffff00; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Audience **<span style="background-color: #ffff00; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">/ setting/ performance – in black communities studies of speech interaction in church, street, home. Distinct difference between black rhetoric and white rhetoric is relationship between speaker and audience – much more audience response (set responses, encouragement, suggestions, nonverbal) – highly dialogic, success measured by response.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In black communities, linguistic virtuosity is highly priced. Streed is scene over verbal play (mostly male) with creates solidarity AND has a competitive edge.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Ability to rap establishes dominance, camaraderie, solidarity, and opposition to white hegemony
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Black rhetoric still uses proofs, evidence appeals (ethos and pathos), metaphor –
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Sociolinguists and Gates identify a large number of black speech forms as “tropes” – repetition, rhyming, and hyperbole are similar to traditional rhetorical tropes. Others, like signifying, are more like genres or modes – Bakhtin’s speech genres.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Signifying is general term for several forms of persuasion, insult, boasting, or lying all by innuendo or indirection. **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">**<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">With signifying goes “sounding.” -- direct insult boast or lie **
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Black discourse names many rhetorical devices – oral culture – internalized oppositional status in dominant culture – ethos established by linguistic heroism
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Signifying as underground method of rhetorical control.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Tropes: signifying as master trope – then laying the dozens, naming, nicknaming, jargon, woofing, you’ mama, etc.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Non verbal: pitch cadence, emphasis, giving skin, etc.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Against only blacks teaching AF. Am. “ it can’t be a real subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject.”
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Black writing/oral stories as deconstructionist
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Connections to Judith Butler’s //<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Excitable Speech //, a safety valve preventing violence, or a violence of rebellion on its own.
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Signifier (sound image) signified (concept)
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Oppositional (motivated) Ralph Ellison “signifies upon Richard Wright’s work, and Ishmael Reed upon both—create new meanings ( a type of intertextuality?)
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“Thinking about the black concept of signifyin' is like stumbling unaware into a hall of mirrors” – doubled and redoubled sign – but not sign redoubled – only signifier
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">political and metaphysical confrontation between Afro-American and American culture
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">“Signifyin”(black) vs signifying (white) – double voiced word (Bakhtin – meant to hear both a version of the original AND the second speaker’s evaluation of that utterance from a different point of view)
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">in Black vernacular, signification = rhetorical figures over signifier
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">black “other’s discourse as rhetoric”
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">while specific terminology of black tropes may vary, the rhetorical functions of the tropes remain consistent – it is not surprising that the classical tropes also figure in BEV
 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">double voiced nature of Signifyin --

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 24px;">Other Works by Gates

 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> "Integrating the American Mind." In Covino & Jolliffe's //Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries//
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">//"//The "Blackness of Blackness": A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey" //Critical Inquiry//, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Jun., 1983), pp. 685-723

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 24px;">Other Suggested Reading

 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> CCCC 1974 - Students' Right to Their Own Language
 * <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Farell, Thomas J. "Defense for Requiring Standard English." In Covino & Jolliffe's //Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries//