The Signifyin(g) Chronotope: The Exemplary Example of the Street in Modern African American Literature

This article picks up on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s seminal conception of the signifyin(g) monkey from 1988 to explore how this notion, closely associated with language, can be applied and developed in relation to twenty-first-century concerns with embodiment and spatiality. The article takes its cue from Gates’s connection of African American traditions of doubleness with Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of double-voicedness but instead explores the benefits of associating them with another of Bakhtin’s concepts: the chronotope. The purpose is to explore how connecting doubleness and the chronotope creates a theoretical tool, the signifyin(g) chronotope, that may prove useful to analyses of African American literature. The article homes in on one prominent example, the chronotope of the street, as a potent site where spatial and temporal conditions shape the agency of the characters traversing it. Through this example the author argues that the concept of the signifyin(g) chronotope can help us recognize developments in modern African American literature. The ambition is to underline the applicability and usefulness of the notion of the signifyin(g) chronotope more broadly.