A Relation of Difference: The Politics of Black “Signification”

Louis Gates, Jrs examination of the the tropes of tropes in sick lit is a pi singleering account of the vicissitudes of a movement of difference. As a critical response to The Signifying putter, the essay would seek to reveal the idiosyncrasies of Gates literary criticism with relations to the idiosyncrasies of barren literary tradition of difference.The Discreteness of black DifferenceThe second chapter of Louis Gates, Jr.s famous book The Signifying Monkey has a wonderful analysis of the rhetoric system and Afro-American signification traditions.The black concept of signifying, quite diametricly from the standard English, is inherently difficult to traverse as it (re)doubles itself at every attempt of closer examination. Gates (1988) forcefully argues that parallel to the classic confrontation between Afro-American culture and American culture, there is a political and metaphysical, relationship that black Signification bears to the English signification is, paradoxically, a relation of difference inscribed within a relation of identity (p.45).It is important to none the organic relations black literary traditions have with the identity of blacks, which are again (re)constructed through these traditions themselves. The distinctness of Black difference emerges from its status of being parallel to the white American literary universe.Intertextuality is also a discrete feature of the Afro-American belles-lettres as each poem refers to other poems of the same genre (Gates, 1988, p.60). Here, the repeat and revision of structural elements are something common and shared.It must bee seen as a narrative technique for emphasizing the common signifier which is a de facto priority for the community. Therefore, Gates asserts that value, in this art of poeisis, lies in foregrounding rather than in the invention of a novel sense (p.61). Needless to say, the common mother wit in black literature as a shared centre is diametrically opposite to the white Americ an idea of new signified as authentic.Moreover, it is possible to argue that the Black English itself is a different lecture and the blacks do not speak the same language of the whites. For Gates, the language of blackness encodes and names its sense of independence through a rhetorical process that we might think of as the Signfyin(g) black difference. For Blacks, language and its kickshaw is a enquiry of (re)inventing themselves as creative, as opposed to the white impose idea of being imitative.In addition, for blacks, a new language with their own jargons is a tool for ultimately defining themselves. The black life is more most the liveliness poetry in the streets than the taught poetry in the class rooms. The question of black Signifying is a question of another way of life that is not centered on the literary paradigms of white male Europeans.The assertion of the political science black difference by Gates is not an attempt at molding a difference for a new zone of engag ement. But, it is the guileless assertion of what really exist as the difference of both living and creating since slavery as black people have been Signifyin(g), without explicitly barter it that (Gate, 1988, p.67).As it is in the white language, black Signification is not merely a form of indirect signification on the contrary, it is a way of identifying with ones true identity. Most importantly, Black Signification is a labyrinthine rhetorical device that is heterogeneous and multiple.ConclusionThe Signification in black literature is closely related to the discreteness of their way of life. The Black Signifyin(g) is closely conjugate to the identity and collective belongingness of the blacks. The Significations stands not with its meaning, but with its utterance itself.ReferenceGates, H. L, Jr. (1988). The Signifying Monkey a Theory of Afro-AmericanLiterary Criticism. Oxford Oxford University Press. pp. 44-89