Black Film As a Signifying Practice: Cinema, Narration and the African American Aesthetic Tradition

by Gladstone L. Yearwood

Book by Yearwood, Gladstone L.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 4 out of 5]

Building upon Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s groundbreaking scholarship on African American aesthetics (1989) The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1989), Gladstone Yearwood (2000) posits a “signifying practice” to provide an analytical framework in which individuals can make sense of a film’s cultural and theoretical expressions specific to the Black experience onscreen in Black Film as a Signifying Practice. Yearwood blends Gates’ theory of signifying with a semiological analysis to formulate his understanding of how a signifying practice might function in Black film. Yearwood argues for a signifying practice to underscore that meaning is not a given property of film and that it is determined and is fact not separated from socio-cultural and socio-political context.

I agree with Yearwood's formulation but it feels clunky, at times. The book tries to balance historical analysis and framework of Black cinematic images, theory, literature review, critique, and film analysis. There are too many things happening in the book for the reader to walk away with a coherent understanding of what is, essentially, a new theoretical and methodologically way of viewing filmmaking, specifically contributions made by Black filmmakers. Because of this the richness of a "signifying practice" gets lost and, at times, buried under information. I think this book would have been better served as two separate books, one that focused on film history and film critique and the second focusing on theory and film analysis utilizing said theoretical approach. Overall, Yearwood provides a much needed and fascinating exploration of Black cinema and this book should be mandatory reading for film studies as whole.