Signifyin(g) Academic Discourse

            I would like to suggest that the reading from Gates might itself function as the form of Signifyin(g) that he discusses throughout the selection. Taken as genres, academic books, articles, and essays exhibit and enshrine the linguistic and rhetorical practices of the white, male intellectual class which until the last century retained nearly exclusive ownership over the intellectual priorities and practices of American universities. Gates, who the biographical notes reveals grew up the son of working class parents in a small town in West Virginia, certainly could not be considered a native speaker of traditional American university parlance. His essay illustrates the inability of culturally-white theories of linguistics to describe the language practices of African Americans, to be sure, but it seems to me that he achieves something else in the process. After I finished reading, Gates had inspired me to consider the cultural particularities of the academic genre itself, so much that I’d argue that this essay could itself be called an act of Signifyin(g).

            Gates writes, for instance, of how “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’ and how this process ‘disrupted the nature of the sign/signified equation itself” (1553). Rather than words functioning as symbols of a concept, they functioned as symbols of a trope or rhetorical tactic which disrupted the literal meaning of the sign/signifier concept that influenced so much of modern linguistics. Gates’ analysis of the way this use of language emerged out of taking the received symbols and giving them new meaning speaks not only to the potential of language to serve as a means of resisting authority, but also demonstrates the inadequacy of the very linguistic analysis that had been used to condemn AAVE as ungrammatical.

            What it is especially interesting to me is that Gates still writes very much within the conventions of academic discourse. He cites all the right theorists, uses all the right documentation, and he even employs the characteristically obfuscating prose by which we may know that another academic is truly a genius. But the effect of this writing demonstrates how the genre of academic writing itself emerged out of the culture which has been unable, through its own devices, to describe or assess the language of African-Americans. I would argue, in brief, that Gates has emptied the genre of the academic essay of its commonly purported purpose of description or mere knowledge-productive, and injected with a critical edge that is as thoroughly analytical as it is evaluative. The bottom line, I think, is that white academics found in the inability of their systems of linguistics to describe African-American English an excuse for racism. And so it seems that, in the end, Gates is himself Signifyin(g), using the very genre which he writes within to subvert, challenge, and correct the people who use it.