To Make a Literature Black

Author(s): KENNETH W. WARREN

Source: Early American Literature , 2015, Vol. 50, No. 3 (2015), pp. 843-847
Published by: University of North Carolina Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43946704

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 Kenneth w. warren University of Chicago

To Make a Literature Black

A helpful point of departure for considering the significance of

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s, The Signifying Monkey twenty-five years after its
publication may be Gatess own assertion that "the most prevalent mani-
festation of signifying over the last four decades is to be found in the cor-
pus of hip-hop music. You might say hip-hop is signifying on steroids"
(xxix). That hip-hop has become a worldwide musical phenomenon is be-
yond dispute. That Gates's testimony (which he mentions proudly in the
new introduction) in the 1990 trial in which the rap group 2 Live Crew was
acquitted on charges of obscenity for its sexually explicit lyrics played any
significant role in raps commercial success is perhaps plausible if some-
what harder to credit. Yet for Gates the concomitant rise of rap and hip-
hop and his own career may constitute the most notable legacy of his work.
Of course, Gates s view on this point does not necessarily entail that we
also conclude that The Signifying Monkey has been inconsequential for
the study of early American literature (and one could, on this point, total
up citations to that work in journals and monographs on the period). Yet
whatever picture we might paint statistically or otherwise of the book s in-
fluence on the scholarship of the period, it is clear that in thinking about his
book Gates remains enamored of the idea that each historical moment of

expression by African-descended peoples constitutes a "part of the never-

ending intertextual conversation that's been going on in the black tradition
at least since Esu-Elegbara came to embody indeterminacy in the African
tradition" (xxxii). The point is that when we read texts by black writers we
hear the present in the past and the past in the present. As Gates elaborates:

Texts written over two centuries ago address what we might think of as
common subjects of condition that continue to be strangely resonant,
and relevant, as we approach the twenty-first century. Just as there are
remarkably few literary traditions whose first century's existence is de-
termined by texts created by slaves, so too are there few traditions that

{843

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844Ì EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME 50, NUMBER 3

claim such an apparent unity from a fundamental political condition

represented for over two hundred years in such strikingly similar pat-
terns and details. (140)

Yet against Gatess attempt to pull the study of early American litera-
ture into the currents of an ongoing black tradition there arose during this
same period notions of the Atlantic world and the Black Atlantic more
committed to historical periodization and discontinuity than to the telos
of nationhood or peoplehood. If for Gates, under the sway of the signi-
fying monkey as a trope, the experience of engaging with black writers
in the eighteenth century and hip-hop performances in the early twenti-
eth is finding the familiar in the distant and making aural and sonic con-
nections across time and space, for other historically minded scholars,
as I wrote some years ago in a reflective piece on the notion of the black
Atlantic ("Taking the Measure"), the goal has been to bring into view a
world peopled with black men and women whose horizons of expectation
and being-- and whose notions of literariness- diverge significantly from
our own. Initially for historians of the period, and increasingly for early
Americanist literary scholars, the Atlantic world was seen as indicating a
spatial-temporal moment rather than a transhistorical sensibility.
Of course, one cannot invoke the term Black Atlantic without bringing
into the discussion Paul Gilroy s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (1993), which was published four years after The Signifying
Monkey and announced as, among other things, an attempt to decenter
the United States from the study of black culture and intellectual history.
For Gilroy, the transatlantic life itineraries of black writers from Olaudah
Equiano and Phillis Wheatley forward to the twentieth century, which in-
cluded transatlantic crossings between the Americas, Europe, and Africa,
attested to the extranational character of black expression beginning with
the Enlightenment. And it was this international aspect of black literary
production that Gilroy believed US-centered scholarship had slighted.
Interestingly, Gates makes a few brief, but significant, appearances in
Gilroy 's volume, a somewhat occluded presence that may indicate Gilroy 's
fear that the two shared more in terms of their assumptions and agendas
than Gilroy wished to acknowledge. That is, for both authors, the relation
of black writers to the Enlightenment was foundational. In Gates's account
the Enlightenment's enthronement of the capacity to reason as the basis

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 Symposium: To Make a Literature Black { 845

of humanity "led directly to the relegation of black people to a lower rung

on the Great Chain of Being," setting the stage on which black cultural
expression would become absolutely necessary (142). Somewhat similarly,
Gilroy s Black Atlantic locates the politics of black expression within and
against Enlightenment thought. He identifies, first, what he calls a "poli-
tics of fulfillment," that is "mostly content to play occidental rationality
at its own game" (38). Black thought in this vein does not represent a re-
pudiation of Enlightenment reason but a recognition of its partial utility.
But supplementing and, indeed, surpassing this politics of fulfillment is
what Gilroy calls a "politics of transfiguration," which is both anti- and
precognitive, and carries within it the Utopian dimensions of black expres-
sive practice (38). This politics finds its chief expression in black music. Ac-
cording to Gilroy this "grudging gift that supposedly compensated slaves
not only for their exile from the ambiguous legacies of instrumental reason
but for their complete exclusion from modern political society has been
refined and developed so that it provides an enhanced mode of communi-
cation beyond the petty power of words spoken or written" (76). The ori-
entation of a literary tradition around music aligns the project of both men
in asserting that what is most distinctive about black expression abides in
a nondiscursive register. It is the sound of what black people say more so
than the meaning of the words they use that carries the import of black ex-
pression because, to quote Gilroy, "even words stretched by melisma and
supplemented by the screams which still index the conspicuous power
of the slave sublime, will never be enough to communicate its unsayable
claims to truth" (37).
However, where Gilroy seeks to depart most emphatically from Gates
in this willingness to overlook semantic content in favor of the inventive-
ness of black musical performance is in his assessment of the 2 Live Crew
trial that Gates mentions proudly in his introduction. Criticizing Gates for
going "beyond simply affirming the artistic status of this particular hip
hop product" in order to argue "that the Crews material was a manifesta-
tion of distinctively black cultural traditions," Gilroy expresses outrage at
a view of black expression that appears to provide no critical purchase on
misogyny and that "collude [s] in the belief that black vernacular is noth-
ing other than a playful cavalcade of Rabelaisian subversion" (84). Argu-
ing that a greater diversity of sexual mores defines hip-hop performance,
Gilroy calls on other rappers from other locales.

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846} EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME 50, NUMBER 3

Yet notwithstanding Gilroy's effort to open up some distance between

his project and Gates's, Gilroy's Black Atlantic cannot help but indicate the
tenor of The Signifying Monkey, and in doing so helps underscore the point
I made at the outset, which is to say that the ambition of The Signifying
Monkey and much of the debate it has engendered in African American
literary study is to find what links literature by African-descended peoples
across space and time- to find in its formal features the very things that
make literature black, despite significant differences among black writers.
Of course, as the author of What Was African American Literature ? (2011) -
a book that argues (I want to say, proves , but that would be hubristic) that
the idea that black people, collectively as a race, should produce (or were
in the process of producing) a distinctive literature that exemplified the
capacities and promises of the race and advocated on behalf of the race did
not fully emerge until the late nineteenth century- my view is that while
Gatess signature work helped draw attention to black-authored literature,
it also helped ensure that many of the questions guiding inquiry into that
work would be the wrong ones.1
Although Signifying Monkey actually began where it ought to have,
which is in acknowledging that black authorship has always taken place
within and against political and social constraints, it erred, first, in ab-
stracting from the specificity of history "a common experience, or, more
accurately, the shared sense of a common experience" that resolves real
differences among black peoples into variations of the same, and, second,
in reifying patterns of allusion, parody, and revision employed by cer-
tain black writers into a spectral skeletal structure for writing by all blacks
(141). The Signifying Monkey responded to the recognition that one could
not describe literary expression as a manifestation of innate racial iden-
tity by trying to make racial identity a function of textual expression. In
doing so, it evacuated the historical dimension from its explanatory arse-
nal, as Adolph Reed, Jr., notes in observing: "Gates's emphasis on histori-
cal contingency in his construction of black distinctiveness collapses in
short order. He presents a definitive black vernacular simultaneously as
the product of the slave experience in the New World and as indigenously
African" (141). What was true at the time of its initial publication, and re-
mains true twenty-five years later, is that in seeking to make black litera-
ture black, The Signifying Monkey made history a nullity, which may be its
most dubious legacy.

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 Symposium: To Make a Literature Black { 847

NOTES

1. For my discussion of Gates in What Was African American Literature? see 1

WORKS CITED

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. C

Harvard UP, 1993.
Reed, Adolph Jr. W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabi
the Color Line. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Warren, Kenneth W. "Taking the Measure of the Black Atlantic." States
Emergency: The Object of American Studies. Ed. Russ Castronovo and
Gillman. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. 116-23.

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