Context: this Jeopardy answer from 2023-12-25
> Answer: This Harvard professor’s “The Signifying Monkey” traces the bond between Black oral tradition & literature
> Question: Who is Henry Louis Gates?
Not knowing anything about the book, it felt really weird to me that a book about black oral tradition would be named as it is. Given the fact that monkey is a racist slur used against black people, is the title a parody of that? Or is it something else that I’m totally missing?
by BIG_FICK_ENERGY
3 Comments
From Wikipedia “Henry Louis Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.” He is a prominent black scholar.
It’s a very internet-searchable African folk character. Have you watched My Name is Dolemite? His whole gimmick is steeped in that folk tradition.
Henry Louis Gates is a Harvard professor and documentary filmmaker. He can be seen regularly on PBS in “Finding Your Roots.” The Signifying Monkey is a folktale involving animals, including yes, a monkey, who’s a trickster. Gates delves into the story, using it to examine aspects of African American culture and literature. Animal stories that illustrate things about human behavior have been written since the dawn of writing, all around the world, and shared orally for countless generations before that. Do you think Gates should have picked a different title in 1988 to accommodate the sensitivities of someone in 2023, even though the story actually is about a monkey, a lion, and an elephant?