The African-American oral tradition in selected writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker

This study investigates the African-American Oral Tradition found in selected works of three Black women writers. Focus is limited, however, to call-response and signification. Call-response and signification originated in West African ethnic communities and are surviving oral features brought to this country by the African slave.; Some critics take exception to the idea that signification comes directly from Africa. Michael Losonsky and others, as M. R. Ayers E. J. Ashworth, proponents of Locke's philosophy, suggest that signification has its origin in European culture. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asserts that Signification (with a capital S) emanated from the African trickster figure, Esu-Elegbara. Gates, however, also implies that this “naming ritual emptied the signifier ‘signification’ of its received concepts and [slaves] filled this empty signified with their own concepts” (46).; The present study examines the ways that the black slaves in this country acculturated signification from their African homeland. Some characteristics of signification, such as indirection, double-voicedness, ironic and humorous put-downs, are ripostes that were evident in the slave culture and remain a viable feature of African American culture today.; This study analyzes Signification and call-response in three African American women novelists, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. The study argues that these women created distinct aesthetic narratives that are culturally and literarily important to both the Anglo-American and African-American communities. The novels included in this study are Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, and Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland and The Color Purple.; Although other critics have studied oral features of call-response and signification separately within the literary works of these three authors, no one has explored both features within one text while examining the folk and aesthetic components that the three women writers have appropriated. This work provides such a synthesis.