Put simply, signifyin’ is a vernacular action that revises the inherited meaning of words, namely from whites, as a means of subversion by Black English speakers. …I tend to think, or I wish to believe that this guerrilla action occurred intentionally on this term, because of the very concept with which it is associated in standard English” (1553). By doing so, by supplanting the received, standard English concept associated by (white) convention with this particular signifier, they (un)wittingly disrupted the nature of the sign = signified/signifier equation itself. Gates succinctly defines the process of signifying here: “Some black genius or a community of witty and sensitive speakers emptied the signifier ‘signification’ of its received concepts and filled this empty signifier with their own concepts. At the core of Gates’ concept is the embrace of ambiguity as a source of invention, and in Gates’ concept, a source of reclaimed power. Gates’ outlines his central concept of signifyin(g), a linguistic game (of sorts) where the sign-specifically the signifier or discursive label-is doubled and redoubled in meaning and function. “The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g)” Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning.” The Signifying Monkey: Towards a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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