Tricksters: The Signifying Monkey

After yesterday's book about tricksters of western Africa, I wanted to follow up with this groundbreaking book: The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., just a click away at the Internet Archive.

This book, published in 1988, won the American Book Award, and it has its own Wikipedia article. Gates's interests in this book are more literary than folkloric, but the idea of the trickster is an essential part of the notion of "signifying" that Gates develops and then applies to the works of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed. The Yoruba trickster Eshu played an important role in yesterday's book, and he's back again here in Part One of Gates's book: A Myth of Origins: Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey. In this chapter, Gates looks at the Middle Passage and what it means for the Africans captured and enslaved to bring their culture with them, and how a new African culture emerged in the Americas. Both Eshu and the Signifying Monkey have Wikipedia chapters of their own too!

So, jump in and enjoy Gates's adventure of intellectual discovery as narrated in this book; if you enjoy Part One about the tricksters, then just keep on reading.

The Signifying Monkey:

A Theory of African American Literary Criticism

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

From Trickster to Badman:

The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom

by John W. Roberts