Slave Culture 259Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. “Signifying.” In Mother Wit, From the
Laughing Barrel, ed. Alain Dundes. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1996.
Smitherman, Geneva. Black Talk, Words and Phrases from the
Hood to the Amen Corner. New York: Houghton, 2000.Slave Culture
Slave culture refers to the totality of shared learned behav-
ior and system of meanings that were historically inherited
by slaves from their ancestral past, socially constructed and
adapted during their enslavement and transferred to new
generations. Th eir culture encompassed all dimensions of
their human existence, shaped and constructed their re-
alities and worldviews, and oft en served an adaptive and
supportive role. Culture is internally represented as the
cherished symbols, goals, beliefs, and values of slaves. As
an external representation, it includes the arts, rituals, arti-
facts, institutions and social structures of the slave period.
Th e ancestral African past of slave culture has been de-
bated by historians. E. Franklin Frazier (1894–1962) noted
in Race and Culture Contacts in the Modern World that few
remnants of African culture survived slavery. Dissenting
with this view, Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963) docu-
mented many Africanisms, or African expressive cultural
practices, in Th e Myth of the Negro Past (1941), which he
found in the costume, culinary and funerary practices, hair
braiding, musical instrument making, naming and tradi-
tions related to childbirth, proverbs, techniques of planting
and harvesting, architecture, and ways of speaking. Hersko-
vits described vestiges of West Africa in slave culture such
as the signifi cance and homage paid to ancestors, the use of
song for social derision, extensive employment of magic,
the use of animal tales as devices of enculturation and
moral education, African linguistic patterns, and a major
role for women in economic life. Newbell Niles Puckett
(1898–1967), in his classic Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro
(1926), also studied slave culture and discussed the pres-
ervation of African traits in slave burial customs and reli-
gious beliefs in ghosts, witchcraft , and voodoo. Many slaves
continued to hold onto these African worldviews in which
spirits, charms, and spells had potent power. For historian
Sterling Stuckey, the ring shout is another example of a car-
ryover of cultural and religious practice from Africa where
a sense of identity was celebrated and formed.either happy and rejoiced to express sorrow or sad and
longing to convey feelings of joy. African American slaves
used to employ this process of codifi cation in order to com-
municate without having white masters spy on them.
Th e act of signifying consists of a three-step infor-
mative process and a double didactic challenge. First, the
signifi er targets his “momentary victim.” Second, the lat-
ter receives the two-layered message, which contains both
the blurring content and its “real” signifi cance to be deci-
phered. Th e process of signifying both conceals the mes-
sage and provides the receiver with the necessary clues to
decode it. Th ereaft er, the temporary prey fi gures the mes-
sage out and gains a better awareness at the same time. On
the other hand, the act of receiving the message itself un-
folds according to three phases: fi rst, the addressee gets the
misleading message; then he undergoes the humiliating
eff ects of its blurring content, for instance, misunderstand-
ing or a feeling that he is being laughed at. And last, the sig-
nifi er’s target starts fi guring out the keys the message also
contains before grasping its initially intended meaning.
Th us, the process of signifying aims both to convey some
information and to teach how to decode its blurred con-
tent, thanks, for example, to tonal connotation or implau-
sible aspects of the message itself. Th is allows us to add two
more remarks. On one hand, the information conveyed is
not the sole element whose origins are veiled. Indeed, the
signifi er’s target may also remain diffi cult to identify until
the signifying process has concluded. Th e addressee could
be, for instance, a third person attending the instance of
signifying without realizing he or she is the actual receiver.
On the other hand, the signifi er’s purpose could consist of
both a didactic attempt toward the addressee and a way
for the signifi er to express his disbelief toward a set of cir-
cumstances thanks to the ironic dimension of the act of
signifying.
See also: Anansi the Spider; Animal Trickster Stories; Brer
Rabbit; John the Slave Tales
Valerie Caruana-LoiselBibliography
Courlander, Harold. A Treasury of Afro-American Folklore. New
York: Marlowe, 1996.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Th e Signifying Monkey, A Th eory of African-
American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness. Lon-
don: Oxford University Press, 1978.