Sunny Xiang
Projecting Henry Louis Gates’s ‘Signifyin(g)’ subject: A qualification of double-voicedness and/as double-consciousness
In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates proposes that representational strategies invocative of black oral traditions can project and instantiate the speaking subject. By applying Bakhtin’s writings on language to Du Bois’s theory of black identity, Gates yokes double-consciousness as heightened self-awareness with double-voicedness as expressive innovation. This reinterpretation of double-consciousness, however, turns the ontological crux of “looking at oneself through the eyes of others” into an “exhilarating” condition that liberates the double-voiced subject, not in spite of but by way of internal division. I believe that Gates’s conceptualization of doubleness-as-division with respect to language and subjectivity projects the vernacular speaker not into being but into question. My paper critiques Gates’s elision of the historical circumstances that have engendered for African-Americans the trauma of mediated and divided selfhood. In casting black identity as both a subject-in-formation and a fundamentally attenuated subject, I figure the vernacular speaker in the ambivalent terms of projection. My understanding of projection hazards neither a wholesale excavation nor a positive theorization of subjectivity but rather highlights the hegemonic relations within which historically oppressed subjects must negotiate. Rather than supposing a causal relation between voice and subjectivity, I read the literary representation of vernacularity as an injunction to rigorously historicize the processes of language-production and identity-formation – even when (and especially when) these processes are founded on exclusions and negations. Neither a wholesale dismantling nor a spurious reinvigoration of subjectivity, such an approach qualifies Gates’s celebration of black vernacularity while still engaging with its horizon of agential possibilities.
I am a second-year PhD student in English Literature at UC-Berkeley. My interests broadly include twentieth-century literature, critical theory, ethnic literary and cultural studies (in particular Asian American studies), and narrative and the novel.
