{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.019574944071588368, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002796420581655481, 'mean_word_length': 4.884868421052632, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
To Make a Literature Black

A helpful point of departure for considering the significance of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s, The Signifying Monkey twentyfive years after its publication may be Gates’s own assertion that “the most prevalent manifestation of signifying over the last four decades is to be found in the corpus of hiphop music. You might say hiphop is signifying on steroids” (xxix). That hiphop has become a worldwide musical phenomenon is beyond dispute. That Gates’s testimony (which he mentions proudly in the new introduction) in the 1990 trial in which the rap group 2 Live Crew was acquitted on charges of obscenity for its sexually explicit lyrics played any significant role in rap’s commercial success is perhaps plausible if somewhat harder to credit. Yet for Gates the concomitant rise of rap and hiphop and his own career may constitute the most notable legacy of his work. Of course, Gates’s view on this point does not necessarily entail that we also conclude that The Signifying Monkey has been inconsequential for the study of early American literature (and one could, on this point, total up citations to that work in journals and monographs on the period). Yet whatever picture we might paint statistically or otherwise of the book’s influence on the scholarship of the period, it is clear that in thinking about his book Gates remains enamored of the idea that each historical moment of expression by Africandescended peoples constitutes a “part of the neverending intertextual conversation that’s been going on in the black tradition at least since EsuElegbara came to embody indeterminacy in the African tradition” (xxxii). The point is that when we read texts by black writers we hear the present in the past and the past in the present. As Gates elaborates: