The Black English vernacular is not disappearing. See attached documents: The Velvet Underground, Shaft, Jack Kerouac, Ludacris.ī.
What I brought from it is how this archetype has gone even further than Gates explicated, reverberating through all American literature, culture, and music, be it Black or White. West African folklore, and more especially its monkey archetype, has, via diaspora, made its way into all Black literatures. To be sure, this isn't cozy bedside reading, but he makes a solid case.
I'm pretty sure the vast majority of pundits, scholars, and commentators who expressed strong opinions about his bullshit arrest back in Spring '09 have never so much as run their index fingers over a volume of Gates' dense, Barthes-influenced scholarship. But a whole lot more people namecheck him than actually read him. You can't make it through a freshman lit seminar without reading Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley, and Zora Neale Hurston, and we can thank Mr. He kind of established what the African-American canon was, and then had enough clout to get it taught in schools.
It's impossible to understate the influence of Skip Gates on the American humanities. The second volume in an enterprising trilogy on African-American literature, The Signifying Monkey -which expands the arguments of Figures in Black -makes an important contribution to literary theory, African-American literature, folklore, and literary history. Gates uses this critical framework to examine several major works of African-American literature-including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo -revealing how these works signify on the black His critical approach relies heavily on the Signifying Monkey-perhaps the most popular figure in African-American folklore-and signification and Signifyin(g).Įxploring signification in black American life and literature by analyzing the transmission and revision of various signifying figures, Gates provides an extended analysis of what he calls the "Talking Book," a central trope in early slave narratives that virtually defines the tradition ofīlack American letters. Interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s original, groundbreaking study explores the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature, elaborating a new critical approach located within this tradition that allows the black voice to speak for itself.Įxamining the ancient poetry and myths found in African, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, and particularly the Yoruba trickster figure of Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey whose myths help articulate the black tradition's theory of its literature, Gates uncovers a unique system for
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