Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1950–) from “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition,” Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992)

2005 ◽  
pp. 193-198
Author(s):  
Lee Morrissey
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Canon Formation ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
African American Tradition

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

The introduction to Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Scriptures, Myths, and Power: The Bible at Work - Chapter Five

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-113
Author(s):  
Burton Mack
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Linguistic Style ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Cultural Function ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Christian Myth ◽  
American Society

Part 6 of Burton Mack's extended conversation with Vincent Wimbush and Institute for Signifying Scripture, Claremont Graduate University. The conversation revolves around the cultural function of the Bible as Christian myth in American society, and the African-American domestication of the Bible as their Scripture. The essay explores the differences between the Bible as myth in the dominant Euro-American tradition, and the Bible as Scripture in African-American experience. Drawing upon the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the concept of "signifying" describes a remarkable linguistic style characteristic of African-American mentality and culture.

Where Honor is Due: Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man

Prospects ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 177-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilson J. Moses
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Frederick Douglass ◽  
The Self ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
African American Tradition ◽  
The 19Th Century

Frederick Douglass may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.

scholarly journals The “Vernacular Process” and the (Re)construction of Tradition in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-663
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Romantic Poetry ◽  
Henry Louis Gates ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Critical Model

The present paper is an attempt to explore, in and through the prism of Ralph W. Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), the workings of Ellison’s “vernacular process” as a concept that informs the author’s critical views incorporated in the novel. More specifically, Ellison’s revisionary enterprise in this narrative demonstrates his view of African-American tradition as integrated in American and Western tradition. While the form of “invisible criticism” in which Ellison engages is a rather self-conscious manifestation of his critical model of the “vernacular process,” the present work contends that this Ellisonian model actually foreshadows Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s critical paradigm of “Signifyin(g).” What Gates names “literary Signification” stands for an indigenous African-American form of literary revision consisting in a black text’s repeating with difference of another black text’s tropes or rhetorical strategies, or such text’s appropriation of aspects of form in a white antecedent text. Through “literary Signification,” Invisible Man revises African-American texts exemplified in the present article by Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) and Native Son (1940). Likewise, Ellison’s narrative also revisits American and European texts, an enterprise to be seen in the present work’s examination of Ellison’s revision of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Walt Whitman’s romantic poetry, and T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). By establishing through “literary Signification” his African-American literary “relatives” as well as his Western and American “ancestors,” Ellison ultimately constructs the African-American literary tradition as embedded in the Euro-American tradition and thus underlines the syncretic character of American literature and culture. Keywords: Integrative, Revision, Tradition, Signifyin(G), “Vernacular Process”.

Taboo language used as banter

2018 ◽  
pp. 333-352
Author(s):  
Elijah Wald
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Native American ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Close Relationships ◽  
American Tradition ◽  
Joking Relationships ◽  
African American Tradition ◽  
The Relationship

Taboo is used in many cultures to cement familial and other relationships, not only by observing taboos but by selectively breaking them. Probably the most common form of societally sanctioned taboo-breaking is within what anthropologists call joking relationships—close relationships in which people are expected to show their affinity by behaving to each other in mocking or insulting ways that would be unacceptable outside the relationship. Such relationships have been found among many Native American groups and throughout Africa, typically involving people who are joined by particular kinship or ceremonial links. In the African diaspora these traditions are maintained in less formal ways, most famously in the dozens, an African American tradition of insult play that most typically involves sexualized or otherwise taboo-skirting insults directed at a companion’s or acquaintance’s mother.

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