African American criticism reject the western literary criticism for the interpretation of

black and African American literature and their critics argue that the so-called western
criticism in not suitable and unable to interpret black text in correct way. Henery Louis Gates
and Houston Jr. Baker make and provide “successful coup” that change black nationalist
hegemony over African-American literary studies by emphasis on questions of narrative
structure, generic convention, literary form, and rhetorical design.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. makes a strong connection between postcolonial theories and
contemporary African American theories, and at how the subordinated culture reacted to and
resisted that dominationColonized ‘other’ learns to speak in a ‘double-voiced” discourse.
More specifically, in his The Signifying Monkey , gates asserts that within an African
American cultural context, ‘signifying’ a name for a particular linguistic practice—(Gates’
examples: the dozens, calling out, rapping, and testifying)A type of verbal dexterity that
comes from a specifically African and African American tradition. For Gates The Signifying
Monkey is a mythic archetypal figure Africa and has the ability to trick more powerful
animals through his verbal skills as well as he can Demonstrate of verbal mastery can be a
mechanism for empowerment within communities where other forms of power. Moreover,
signifying monkey trope also plays on racist construction of Africans as like apes. Thus takes
a white, racist idea of blackness and renames it, signifies on it, so that “monkey” no longer
means an inferior, but represents a person with verbal power and the ability to stir up conflict
between those have more social power than he does.

Gates was the most influential African-American literary critic in the final two
decades of the twentieth century; Baker Jr’s works contains the most significant wide-ranging,
and detailed inquiry into African-American literature by any critic. in his Long Black
Song (1972), Baker makes references nearly to all of the major African-American texts,
authors, and literary movements, as well as the most compelling issues associated with the
study of African-American writing and culture. Furthermore, Baker's distinctive combination
of vernacular culture and high theory in the reading of black texts is most compellingly
demonstrated in The Journey Back (1980) and Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American
Literature (1984). Baker also points out that critics have argued for strong links between the
emergence of the Black Power Movement and the black aesthetic. It was Baker’s 1980 book,
called The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism that initiated even more
widespread interest and debate in the black aesthetic in American studies. In The Journey
Back, Baker argues for an interdisciplinary approach to black American literature and culture
that analyses the framework that he calls‘anthropology of art’.

Additionally, Baker’s synthesis of high theory and the vernacular, which remains
focused upon the economic and social conditions of slavery and modern Afro-American
history, also provides a pedagogic model for producing readings of indigenous texts, readings
that maintain sensitivity to the everyday conditions of artistic existence and production. In
other words, in interrogating and mapping the black aesthetic, Baker has taught critics new
ways of reading literature in general.

To sum up, the previous lines are just few to praise both gates and Baker Jr. for their
great contribution for establishing a significant school of criticism for African American
literature.