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. This superb 25th-Anniversary Edition features a new preface by Gates that reflects on the impact of the book and its relevance for today's society as well as a new afterword written by noted critic W. 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 tradition and on each other. Exploring the process of 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 of black American letters. It elaborates 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, Gates uncovers a unique system for interpretation and a powerful vernacular tradition that black slaves brought with them to the New World. Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as 'eclectic, exciting, convincing, provocative' and in The Washington Post Book World as 'brilliantly original,' Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey is a groundbreaking work that illuminates the relationship between the African and African-American vernacular traditions and black literature.

Gates the signifying monkey