Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies

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 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 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 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 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 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 is signified upon by the signifier; or again, does not signify something; rather, one signifies in some way (52-54). Gates's emphasis on 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. …