Signifyin'

Old-world origins

Signifyin' (vernacular) is a subtle African-American rhetorical device featuring indirect communication or persuasion and the creating of new meanings for old words and signs. The most basic and literal understanding of the term can be gleaned from Literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s reference to the tales of The Signifying Monkey . Here each familiar animal character's critically disparate understanding of one verbal phrase and its original intention is the point of the fable, where these differences in understanding imply the insight, subterfuge, or literal-mindedness of each animal character. Signifyin implies a subtle yet expanded interpretation of a given expression. Beyond the internal world of the tale, Signifyin may alter understanding to a literary gloss, much as we anthropormorphize character via the phrases "a fox" or "a jackal" as refences to classic literary strophes in Aesop's Fables and the Panchatantra. Thus Signifyin may include aspects of repetition, difference, implication as well as association, combining phonemes, words and meanings to create or associate new ones.

Examples

The mercurial and culturally-resonant nature of signifyin' tends to obviate given examples. Once signifyin' elements become understood they are inevitably transformed. The metamorphosis of terms such as "cool" or "hip"- terms whose slang usage might be perceived as fixed and well-understood throughout the world as relating to a concept or thing's cultural appropriateness or the speaker's relationship to the evolution of that culture- these two terms' current useages have certainly been subjected to aspects of signifying in the historical past; and indeed they may said to represent something of the nature of mid-20th century signifyin' in the U.S. But inevitably these terms cannot be understood to readily "signify" anything today: their use may even imply a non-"signifying" misunderstanding of situation or usage.

Academia: The Signifying Monkey by H.L.Gates, Jr.

Available modern academic explications of the term signifyin in the literature deal with critical and semiotic theory and employ erudite references to a wide range of ephemeral, sub-cultural and more literary work. Thus current formal definitions of Signifyin are not always readily understood. Gates' (1988, xxi, 44, 52) references to signifying monkey tales of African-American folklore and the pan-African Yoruba Esu-Elegbara enriched his definition of "signifyin(g)" "as a metaphor for formal revision, or intertextuality, within the Afro-American literary tradition" which he further describes as "the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse." But among other examples, he cites a range of aspects of popular urban cultures: "marking, loud-talking, testifying, calling out (of one's name), sounding, rapping, playing the dozens," and Ralph Ellison's play on Richard Wright's Native Son and Black Boy in his Invisible Man. Other examples are found in stylized bouts of verbal bragging, called toasting, and in hip hop techniques and forms such as sampling and answer records. Roger Abrahams (n.d.) cites the subversive elements of the improvised and repetitive lyrics of old work-songs such as collected by John and Alan Lomax.

D.G. Myers, Z.N. Hurston, M. Mezzrow

But furthermore, the article "Signifying Nothing" by D.G. Myers is about the book The Signifying Monkey and offers the following significant description of signifying:

"What is the concept of signifying? Gates notes that "few scholars have succeeded in defining it as a full concept," and although he devotes twenty-five pages to the effort, it must be owned that he is little more successful. Gates is best at gathering together other people's definitions. To signify, according to the jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow, is to "hint, to put on an act, boast, make a gesture." The novelist Zora Neale Hurston defines signifying as "a contest in hyperbole carried on for no other reason." In these conceptions, signifying sounds not too different from the traditional category of rhetoric known as "epideictic," a term used for a display piece, a speech the sole purpose of which is to put the orator's gifts on display (epideixis), and not with any practical intention. Yet to assimilate black signifying to the "Eurocentric" tradition of classical rhetoric is to lose "what we might think of as the discrete black difference." And so Gates takes pains to track the concept to Africa instead."

Relationship with music

Caponi (1999) "describes calls, cries, hollers, riffs, licks, overlapping antiphony" as examples of signifying in hip hop music and other African-American music. He explains that signifying differs from simple repetition and from simple variation in that it uses material "rhetorically or figuratively — through troping, in other words — by trifling with, teasing, or censuring it in some way (Wentworth and Flexman 1960; Major 1970). Signifyin(g) is also a way of demonstrating respect for, goading, or poking fun at a musical style, process, or practice through parody, pastische, implication, indirection, humor, tone- or word-play, the illusions of speech, or narration, and other troping mechanisms… Signifyin(g) shows, among other things, either reverence or irreverence toward previously stated musical statements and values." (141) Schloss (2004, 138) relates this to the ambiguity common to African musics including looping (as of a sample) for "it allows individuals to demonstrate intellectual power while simultaneously obscuring the nature and extent of their agency… It allows producers to use other people's music to convey their own compositional ideas".

Are there ways of signifyin(g) that will be forever closed beyond insider groups, suggested in the case of the verboten and transgressing language of every "N-Word"?: "But there is a hidden humor in [Bo Diddley's songs], Mr. Levy said. 'They are often explicitly signifying records which involve putting over a joke on someone who doesn't understand the nuances of African-American thought and speech. It makes fun of white people without them realizing it.'"

Sources

• Caponi, Gena Dagel (1999). Signifyin(G), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 1-55849-183-X.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-503463-5.
• Schloss, Joseph G. (2004). Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0-8195-6696-9.
• Myers, D.G. Signifying Nothing. New Criterion 8 (February 1990): 61-64.

See also

• Call and response
• Epideixis