The Signifying Monkey

The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism is a work of literary criticism and theory by the American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. first published in 1988. The book traces the folkloric origins of the African-American cultural practice of "signifying" and uses the concept of signifyin(g) to analyze the interplay between texts of prominent African-American writers, specifically Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston and Ishmael Reed.

Gates' title alludes to the song "Signifyin' Monkey" by Oscar Brown, recorded in 1960.