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206 19 Against Signifying Psychosocial Needs and Natural Evil Leonard Harris To “signify” is to modify texts by “riffing, woofing, scoring, getting loud on something or sometone.”1 Signifying refers to a wide-ranging critical mode of engagement with texts, not merely an exegesis or the search for the content-meaning of texts, including sacred ones. Signifying is also intended to capture the creation of symbols, meanings, and approaches that are unsettling and made by the social categories defined as subalterns, nondominant populations, minorities, populations on the margin of society, subordinated groups, the oppressed, and the exploited. I will refer to all of these social categories in the following as “subalterns” or “nondominant populations.” Such social categories reform the canonical texts forced on them by dominating groups through signifying, thereby expressing different meanings, symbols, and values presumably beneficial to subalterns and nondominant populations. African Americans, the urban poor, and indigenous populations confronting missionaries are populations considered examples of subalterns using signifying to create discursive practices. Works such as Henry L. Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey2 and Mustpha Marrouchi’s Signifying with a Vengeance3 are examples of books that consider the importance of signifying as a way of inventing and creating symbols, meanings, and values that allow nondominant populations to express their experiences, offer critical commentary, and engage in self-authorship. “Signifying on scriptures” is intended to apply, study, evaluate, critique, and review the ways signifying occurs in relationship to the “scriptures” of religions. I offer a skeptical voice, if not a comprehensive argument expressing doubt that signifying should be considered particularly beneficial to subalterns. Rather, I suggest a stance of agnosticism—namely, that we think of signifying as a tool that lacks evidence for its epistemic existence. In addition, I argue that signifying is not intrinsically beneficial to subalterns. The Pathos of Signifying All forms of signifying in relationship to sacred texts are modes of engagement with the core content of a faith. If white slave masters contended that the Bible justified racial slavery, for example, black slaves often reshaped that message. Nonetheless , the slaves maintained the Bible as scripture; the symbols slaves created Against Signifying: Psychosocial Needs and Natural Evil 207 were compatible with monotheism, the idea of personal salvation, redemption through the intervention of a personal savior, individual soul redemption, a creator God, and an afterlife consisting of individual souls. The dominant and the nondominant populations often share the core of a faith. It is common for masters and slaves both to proclaim their faith in sacred texts, whether the text is the Qur’an, the Bible, Buddhist sacred writing, or shaman visions. Some family of meanings and symbolic implications differ between masters and slaves, but core contents and meanings remain. The core family of meanings stays as unmoved object. Riffing, consequently, must refer to a stable objective store of beliefs and texts, the same store that is used as the source of vile impressions of subalterns and creative meanings by subalterns. Riffing is used by the marginalized to promote self-hatred as well as selfrespect .4 It is thereby, I suggest, a method, like all signifying methods, available for all and sundry purposes. The minstrel tradition is an example of an art form based on degrading blacks. Minstrelsy occurs only in relationship to blacks and whites in America: no population wants to be stereotyped in art as permanently inferior. Minstrels are whites purporting to emulate self-hating blacks, driven by illicit sexual passion, blacks pretending to be happy as subservient, sloppy, poor, and untrustworthy subjects. The minstrel tradition inscribes racist stereotypes by the use of riffing; contemporary decadent rap music does the same by using riffing to romanticize “niggers, bitches, whores, pimps, and prostitutes” and to promote the use of dangerous sexual behavior and illegal drugs. These significations are not just consumed by American audiences, who at best might interpret decadent rap or minstrelsy as the self-mutilations of the unjustly oppressed; but other populations outside America are forced to consume and endure such degrading images and think about what it is to be a “nigger.” Americans, however, including poor black populations, are rarely forced to consider what it means to be a kiffer, kike, leather worker, immigrant, or refugee. One way to think about why signifying may be the source of harm is to think about what it is to engage in self-injury. Signifying, in some instances, is analogous to a form of self-mutilation. “Paradoxically, self-injury is usually a life-sustaining act...

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