The Signifying Monkey Analysis

To anyone who would like to analyze or read about black literature, primarily he/she should start his /her investigation with a great literary critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., with his major and influential book of African-American literature A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism: the Signifying Monkey. In the introduction, Gates illustrates that this book is an attempt “to identify the theory of the criticism, which is inscribed within the black vernacular tradition and that in turn informs the shape of the Afro-American literary tradition” (xix). He justifies the reason from writing the Signifying Monkey as he explains that his desire “to allow the black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions, rather than to read it, or analyze it, in terms of literary theories borrowed from other traditions, appropriated from without” (xix). He constructs his theory that each literary tradition contains “within it the argument for how it can be read” (xix), wants to analyze “a theory of reading […..] That has been generated from within a black tradition itself” (xx) and he clarifies that the “theoretical traditions are related by analogy, but it seemed to me that an ideal way to confound a Eurocentric bias in this project was to explore the black vernacular” (xx).
Henry Gates in The Signifying Monkey …show more content…
The absent g is a figure for the Signifyin(g) black difference” (46). He explains that black people are “black genius or a community of witty and sensitive speakers emptied the signifier ‘signification’ of its received concepts and filled this empty signifier with their own concepts” (46). On the other side, the white people associate with ‘Standard English’ which it is a definite ‘Signifier’, Gates explains that “they (un)wittingly disrupted a nature of the sign = signified/signifier equation”