Mumbo Jumbo’s Paratextual Condition

Abstract

I 1988 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., published The Signifying Monkey, a book that would become a foundational work in African American literary studies. The study’s influence can be traced to the way Gates fashions both a method and a metaphor for reading African American literature on its own terms. “Repetition, with a signal difference,” or Signifyin(g), is the method of Black vernacular meaning-making Gates imports into literary criticism. In his account, an oral-based culture of constant and tactical revision informs howBlack writers “signify” on the culture of letters in order to make it their own. While Gates surveys studies in contemporary linguistics to make this point, the stakes of his argument lie deeper in the past. As a method of creation and interpretation, he contends, Signifyin(g) derives from practices as old as African civilizations’ contact withWestern European colonizers. From the Yoruba divine trickster Esu-Elegbara down to New World folktales shared among the enslaved, practices of rhetorical troping have survived through the character of the Signifying Monkey, which Gates describes as “an indigenous black