What does Lorraine Hansberry as an african-american playwright do in The Drinking Gourd? An analysis of Henry Louis Gates viewpoints

Abstract

Henry Louis Gates, the most contemporary prominent critic of African-American Studies, has taken Saussure’s “signifying” and redefined the term. He describes “Signifyin (g)” in African-American vernacular tradition as a linguistic wordplay which postpones delivery of meaning. He believes in “doublevoicedness”, which means to speak both the language of the dominant culture and the language of the subordinated and asserts “double- voicedness” as the best epitome of “Signifyin (g)”. It is intended to apply the notions of “Doublevoicedness” and “Signifyin (g)” on the manuscript of The Drinking Gourd written by African-American female playwright Lorraine Hansberry and with the contribution of them highlight the anti-colonial attitude of her and the postcolonialist features of the play. The research was a library-based qualitative descriptive one and no quantitative result was expected. The mentioned notions were introduced and some stances and examples of “Signifyin (g)” and “double-voicedness” were discovered in the play. Hypothetically this paper concluded that Hansberry’s drama attain its anticolonial features from these African American voices and cultures.