Jerry,

There is an powerful undercurrent going on in many of the films in which a white director and/or writer (or novelist, if based on a book) portray ethnic minorities as less-than full citizens or partners in the story being told. Or if they're a major character, they're a caracature. But the term "signifying," when used in African American terms, and described very well by Henry Louis Gates in his book Signifying Monkey, is a way of dissing the white viewers in plain sight, and they don't realize it. The term that probably was first acknowledged in African American arts has been used to represent a distinct subtext that contains backtalk and ridicule that happens in America in non-white novels and films.

I think it is Gates who has discussed some of the performances by actors like Steppin Fetchit, who was actually doing a great deal of "signifiying," and his performances were loved by many blacks of the day who saw what he was doing even while it went over the heads of the white audience. The premise is that he was so overplaying his dumb act that he was caracaturing what whites thought blacks were like. Something very similar often happened in the movies when Indians were hired to play Indians (!) (instead of white actors in makeup and wigs). Read some of the early Louise Erdrich novels (Love Medicine and Tracks come to mind) in which at least one of her characters discusses the roles he played as a movie extra. And look at Cheyenne Autumn, in which Southwestern Indians were hired to play plains Indians. They did a lot of dialog in their own language, and while they looked to be "authentically" saying what Ford wanted them to convey, they were actually saying the most outrageous things about the white actors. When Indian audiences watch that movie they are in stitches. Louis Owens writes about this in an essay in his collection called Mixedblood Messages. He also created a character in his last novel Dark River, who was a movie extra and who tells a lot more of those stories. It's Owens' way of getting those stories out there a little more, telling the truth through the venue of fiction.

A final note: If you look into the book and series The Story of English by Robert MacNeil, I think you'll see a chapter (corresponding to a segment in the series) that attributes many aspects of the Southern accent to a relationship between upper-class children who were raised by black nannies. It has been many years since I saw the series, but I wonder if he goes into some of this signification also? I wouldn't be surprised.

SRS