Author: Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Cites

• Ralph Ellison (1)
  • IN: The Signifying Monkey (1988) American Literature, History and Criticism, American
    EPIGRAPH: There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as disctinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity and as link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional metrials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it.
    FROM: Shadow and Act, (1964), Book, US
• Kimberly W. Benston (1)
  • IN: The Signifying Monkey (1988) American Literature, History and Criticism, American
    EPIGRAPH: Improvisation is the play of black differences.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, US
• Alice Walker (1)
  • IN: The Signifying Monkey (1988) American Literature, History and Criticism, American
    EPIGRAPH: Look like to me only a fool would want you to talk in a way that feel peculiar to your mind.
    FROM: The Color Purple, (1982), Book, US
• Walter Scott (1)
  • IN: Figures in Black: Words, siggns, and the "racial" self (1987) American Literature, History and Criticism, American
    EPIGRAPH: Tis said that words and signs have power O'er sprites in planetary hour; But scarce I praise their venturous part, Who tamper with such dangeroud art.
    FROM: Lay of the Last Minstrel, (1805), Poem, UK
• Julia Peterkin (1)
  • IN: Figures in Black: Words, siggns, and the "racial" self (1987) American Literature, History and Criticism, American
    EPIGRAPH: White people leave money to their children, but Black people teach their signs, which is far better.
    FROM: Black April, (1927), Novel, US
• Henry Allen (1)
  • IN: Figures in Black: Words, siggns, and the "racial" self (1987) American Literature, History and Criticism, American
    EPIGRAPH: Anywhere they go, my people know the signs.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, US

Cited by

• Lovaleserie & Moody-Turner Shirley King (1)
  • IN: Contemporary African American Literature: The Living Canon (2013) American Literature, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: c Black writers started reading and revising each other's works, situating their representations of their own experiences and those of other black people, in the tropes and metaphors of other black writers. That is what a literary tradition is: it is a body of texts defined by signifying relations of revision. Like it or not, black literature, because of this, is here to stay.
    FROM: The End of African American Literature? A Chat with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Ken Warren, (2011), Interview, US