Signifyin(g) (Gates) or signifyin' (slang) is an African-American rhetorical device featuring indirect communication or persuasion and the creating of new meanings for old words and signs. Signifying, in this sense, includes repetition and difference, implication and association, combining words and meanings to create or associate new ones. In everyday practice it consists of telling people you know what you think about them or their actions, or making some other point, in an indirect way. Literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1988, xxi, 44, 52) takes the Signifying Monkey tales of African-American folklore and the pan-African Yoruba Esu-Elegbara to function "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." Among other examples, he cites "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 include many 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. An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... Rhetoric from Greek ρήτωρ, rhêtôr, orator) is the art or technique of persuasion, usually through the use of language. ... Communication is the process of exchanging information, usually via a common protocol. ... Persuasion is a form of influence. ... A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. ... In general linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure described a sign as a combination of a concept and a sound-image. ... Repetition is the occurrence of an event which has occurred before. ... Difference is the contrary of equality, in particular of objects. ... In logic, material implication is a binary operator. ... In psychology and marketing, two concepts or stimuli are associated when the experience of one leads to the effects of another, due to repeated pairing. ... The introduction to this article provides insufficient context for those unfamiliar with the subject matter. ... Henry Louis Gates Jr. ... Folklore is the body of verbal expressive culture, including tales, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs current among a particular population, comprising the oral tradition of that culture, subculture, or group. ... Intertextuality is a relationship between two or more texts that quote from one another, allude to one another, or otherwise connect. ... Ralph Ellison (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994, [1]) was an African American scholar and writer. ... Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an African-American author of novels, short stories and non-fiction. ... Native Son (1940) is a novel by African-American author Richard Wright. ... Black Boy is an autobiography by Richard Wright originally published in 1945 by Harper & Brothers. ... Invisible Man is a novel written by Ralph Ellison, developed from a short story that formed the novels initial Battle Royal chapter. ... Hip hop music (also referred to as rap or rap music) is a style of popular music. ... In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion of one sound recording, the sample, and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new recording. ... The answer record is, as the name suggests, a record or track released in answer to a previous recording. ...

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". Hip hop music (also referred to as rap or rap music) is a style of popular music. ... African American music (also called black music, formerly known as race music) is an umbrella term given to a range of musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of United States. ...

Sources

• Caponi, Gena Dagel (1999). Signifyin(G), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 155849183X.
• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. (1988) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195034635.
• Schloss, Joseph G. (2004). Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-Hop. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 0819566969.

See also

• call and response