Gates emphasizes the play of Signifyin(g) while many scholars highlight the aggressive and insulting parts of Signifyin(g), it is more about play and can be used for insulting or building up. “To Signify, is other words, is to engage in certain rhetorical games” (48). It “demonstrate, first, that a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe…It also seems apparent that retaining the identical signifier argues strongly that the most poignant level of black-white difference is that of meaning” (49).
He points to the importance of using the same signifier, “signification”: “‘Signification,’ in standard English, denotes the meaning that a term conveys, or is intended to convey…o revise the term signification is to select a term that represents the nature of the process of meaning-creation and its representation… to critique the nature of (white) meaning itself” (46-7).
Gates asserts that “the Signifying Monkey, stands as the rhetorical principle in Afro-American vernacular discourse” (44).
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