The Signifying Monkey: African-American Literary Criticism

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism published in 1988 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is based around the practice of signifying in the African-American culture. Signifying was a certain wordplay that involved the indirection of denotative and figurative meanings of words. Gates felt as if this practice came from the Trickster archetype found in African mythology. The expression itself derived from the tales about the Signifying Monkey, which was the folk trickster figure thought to have come from slavery in the United States. In most of the narratives, the Monkey managed to trick the powerful Lion by signifying. The term itself carries many metaphorical and theoretical meanings. In The Signifying Monkey, Gates