Signifyin(g) and the Canons

I'd like to add a little different slant to the conversation thus far, and focus on the canons. It seems, at first glance, that the additions of black rhetorics to the canon (not the canons) adds much, but at a certain cost to the traditional understandings of rhetoric. For instance, Henry Gates sees rhetoric (especially Signifyin(g)) as a matter of tropes, which, if we take him at his word, effectively reduces rhetoric to the canon of style. We can see a progression here: whereas with Aristotle, we had five canons, by the time we got to Ramus, we only had two. With Gates in the 20^th century, we are down to one: black rhetoric is mainly about “certain rhetorical games” (1554).

But has Signifyin(g) really robbed us of invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery? Though Gates might not treat of these precisely, it seems unlikely. Invention, for instance, seems to be driven largely by avoidance of direct speech when Signifyin(g). A major constraint, in other words, is that when one speaks in this way, s/he must multiply interpretive possibilities. This can be an aid to invention, a via negativa, a strike at meaning through avoiding the direct route of signification. And arrangement is inevitably present as well, as when Gates discusses the careful way that lines are structured when telling stories or jokes, so maximum impact is present (1564).

Signifyin(g) is primarily about orality, so tropes are used, remixed, and re-used. It is known, for instance, that when a rapper “freestyles,” she is drawing, most often, on years of practice rhyming and inventing phrases, a kind of contemporary progymnasmata (1575). These elements get at the canons of memory and delivery, both.

So while Gates focuses on the indirect nature of Signifyin(g), and on the idea of the practice as a master trope, it seems clear by implication that the other canons are present as well. Indeed, Gates does not seem to want to distance Signifyin(g) from classical rhetoric, as much as to make the case that Signifyin(g) entails more than a simple black “colonization” of a white term (1553). Instead, Signifyin(g) turns on indirection: at multiplying interpretations. The “audience” of the loud talker is free to interpret a speech act as a direct address, or not. The audience of a tale or poem, like that of the monkey and the lion, is free to read himself into the story, or like the lion, to take it at face value.

And this is what Fred Shuttlesworth does with his repurposing of “KKK” to mean “Kennedy, King, and Kruschev.” On the surface, he appears to be joking, and therefore his terminology can be dismissed as clowning around, as working the crowd—he is Signifyin(g) upon a common enemy: the white racists. On the other hand, careful explication of the figures replacing the traditional meaning of KKK reveal that they are carefully-chosen counterparts to totems of Southern conservatism: Kennedy represents Catholicism; King represents civil rights; and Kruschev represents communism, which was attractive to some blacks but terrifying to many Southern conservatives (Holmes 820-821).

Language, for Gates and others, is thus multi-layered, contextual, and fluid, and the canon of style is enriched by this type of black vernacular speech. If we see Gates’s master trope of Signifyin(g) in this way, much can be added to our understanding of rhetoric.