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Milan and Naples. The novel also redefines the magic of the wizard in Shakespeare’s play as sympathetic and empathetic, rather than autocratic.

One of the basic considerations of this essay is how a Shakespearean text like The Tempest is appropriated and transformed by Black writers for their own uses. In The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1988), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. suggests that African American literature grows out of the tradition of the “talking book.’’ Gates explains that illiterate Africans sold into slavery naturally supposed that books “talked,” since that is how the parent language—oral speech—communicated meaning. He notes that as an orally generated and transmitted literature, African American texts exemplify Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogic notion of literary tradition, as well as the liturgical convention of call-and-response in the Black church. A given text operates as an utterance demanding objection, clarification, or revision as a response. If Aristotle considered metaphor the major trope for European poetry, Gates celebrates what he calls “signifying” as the master trope of African and its derivative literatures around the world. To signify in African and African American cultures is to improvise on a given topos, narrative, or joke the way a jazz musician improvises on a progression of chords, melodic structure, or spontaneous riff in the previous musician’s solo. As Gates explains: “In the jazz tradition, compositions by Count Basic (‘Signify’) and Oscar Peterson (‘Signifying’) are structured around the idea of formal revision and implication” (1988:123). Ralph Ellison explains as well that a vernacular literature like African American writing initiates “a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves” (1995:xxi). Playful but willful manipulation of the signifier alters perception of the signified as it appropriates the traditional paradigm. Metamorphosis, rather than metaphor, is therefore at the heart of African and African American narrative style.

The function of signifying, like jazz improvisation, is never to replicate or even simulate, but to complicate, explicate, and recreate. In this sense the plays and plots, or what Aristotle calls the mythoi, of Shakespeare have represented aesthetic challenges to African American writers, particularly when the topos in a play such as Othello or The Tempest involves that evanescent bugaboo of European American culture, race. The European text that trumps or

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