. . . That the vernacular exists as a discourse parallel to standard English dialect is important, but equally important is the manner in which it exists. Vernacular language moves along lines of alteration, maintaining contradictory, ironic, oblique stances vis-à-vis experience, narration, or even assumptions about reality. By doing so, the vernacular is perfectly constituted to undermine ironically whatever dominant language form it employs. In other words, it stands in deconstructive relation to the dominant language whether by using the dialect and syntactical structure of "black English" or by subverting standard English dialect. In this way, the vernacular reflects the defensive status and indirect stance of its users.

The political implications of vernacular signifying for discussion of race and culture are tremendous. When one signifies in the public domain -- with an owner, employer, or within the pages of a text ­ one is intervening politically as well as artistically. As the basis of a critical apparatus, signifying allows us to debunk the fallacy that it is only the "stuff" of black American lives that is art; signifying is a mode of vernacular artistic production as well as a mechanism for "on-site" metacommentary. Signifying redefines racial differences as cultural difference, with all of the complexities entailed in such a recategorization, and puts our notions of reality up for grabs.

When Guyanese novelist and critic Wilson Harris describes the "commonsense" notion of reality as an "obsessive centrality" which can be subverted by language, "the ground of an interior and active expedition through and beyond what is already known,"[1] he is describing also the deliberately encoding project of the primary mode of black American vernacular -- signifying -- a dynamic that is subversive in intent and in practice. Signifying deliberately replaces what is being asked, asserted, understood, with something else -- as though the utterance itself were only the departure point for an engagement in language that interrupts the fixity of representation to allow for exploration of complexity instead of an acceptance of oversimplified notions of the human self-reality that is identity. . . .

. . . Signifying as a mode of discourse playfully deconstructs the language of the dominant culture even while it interrogates the politics imbued in that language to specific use . . . Signifying also uncovers subtexts: language withheld from a speech encounter. . . . Signifying works as a potential weapon of protection, with the power to manipulate the way the community perceives a person even when not directly invoked but existing instead as a possible threat in someone's mind . . . Signifying language, with its insistent plays on double meanings, also derails important details, causing truths to be withheld. . . . And just as signifying in the vernacular redirects the attention of the speakers and listeners in a constantly shifting fashion so that conversation is ever fluid, and the attention always up for grabs, so too does the consciousness of the narrative itself fluctuate. . . .

[1] Wilson Harris, "Fossil and Psyche," in Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles 1966-1981, ed. Hena Naes-Jelinek (Mundelstrup, Denmark: Dangaroo Press, 1981).

excerpted from Lubiano, Wahneema. “The Postmodernist Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of Solomon" New Essays on Song of Solomon. Ed. Valerie Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.