Developed as a major interpretive concept by Henry Louis Gates Jr., Signifyin describes traditions of rhetorical indirection rooted in Black oral culture. In poetry, it appears through parody, double meaning, tonal ambiguity, sly humour, revision, and coded social commentary. Because direct speech could be socially dangerous or politically constrained, indirect expression became both artful and strategic. The concept helps explain how African American poetry often communicates multiple meanings simultaneously to different audiences.

Signifyin, as theorised by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his landmark critical work "The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism" (1988), is the foundational concept for understanding the intertextual, revisionary, and indirect dimensions of African American literary tradition. Gates argues that Black writers "signify on" their predecessors — revising, critiquing, and transforming earlier texts through strategies of irony, parody, and double-voiced discourse — creating a tradition of ongoing dialogic engagement. Students must read Gates's book as essential critical infrastructure. Related terms include the talking book, vernacular tradition, blues poetics, counterstory, and the trickster tradition. Understanding signifyin transforms how one reads canonical figures: Hughes signifying on Whitman, Brooks on canonical sonnets, Baraka on the Beat poets.