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Gates's approach in The Signifying Monkey is squarely formalist insofar as it posits signifying as a principle of intertextual repetition that operates transhistorically, without any significant variations, across eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American narrative texts. To be fair, Gates's ambition in this book is to arrive at a postmodern theory of the dynamics of black literary intertextuality rather than to map out the specifics of postmodern black fiction; thus, postmodernism in Gates's account works more as an hermeneutic aid than as a periodizing category. But in his chapter on Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Gates does make certain gestures toward a periodizing notion of the postmodern. Reed is the only novelist considered in The Signifying Monkey whom Gates explicitly terms "postmodern" (224). Reed earns this label because, through his use of signifying, he parodies the established tropes and conventions of the African American novelistic tradition. What's more, by calling attention to the constructedness of his novel as a text rather than a transparent reflection of black experience, Reed suggests that blackness, far from being "a transcendent signified," is an unstable content produced only through the process of signification (235). In this reading of Mumbo Jumbo, the formal experimentation of the postmodern novel seems inherently to carry such ideological and political consequences as deflating notions of racial essence. Gates's account of Reed, signifying, and postmodernism has proved highly influential, setting the terms for much subsequent discussion of not only Reed's fiction but also of the sources and directions of black literary postmodernism in general. Following Gates, critics such as Wahneema Lubiano or Craig Hansen Werner regard black vernacular forms and practices (such as signifying or jazz improvisation) as a reservoir of subversive stylistic strategies that approximate and predate those associated with postmodernism. Extending the formalist implications of Gates's argument, most accounts of black literary postmodernism imply that, by virtue of interrupting fixed norms of representation, postmodern stylistic strategies yield ideologically and politically oppositional effects. While in Gates's reading of Mumbo Jumbo what Reed subverts are monolithic and essentialist notions of blackness, others argue that black postmodern fiction contests the cultural authority of modern Western metanarratives through its formal experimentation inspired by black vernacular culture.2 This argument helps to secure not only a unique cultural lineage for black literary postmodernism, but also its political difference from other brands. So, although it shares a stylistic repertoire with other varieties of postmodernism, the postmodern black novel derives this repertoire from indigenous sources and puts it to different-more serious and critical-uses. In the first book published on African American postmodern novels, Robert Elliott Fox takes up Charles Newman's well-known condemnation of postmodern fiction for its lack of moral grounding, and asserts in response that "[n]owhere in the universe of black writing is there such a thing as a purely amoral text" (8). Echoing Fox, later critics such as Bernard Bell and Craig Werner likewise remark on the moral foundation and social commitment that distinguish black from dominant strands of postmodern fiction (Bell 6, Werner xv-xviii). Arguments for the subversive political propensity of postmodern formal experimentation carry very specific implications for the genre of the novel. The object that most drastically needs to be overhauled is the realist novel, which is said to reinforce a cluster of modern Western paradigms and modes of thought, including teleological patterns of historical development, totalized models of social order, rationalist epistemologies, and unitary and centered norms of subjectivity.
Approximate Word count = 2222
Approximate Pages = 8.9
(250 words per page double spaced)
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