Demonstration of Life

Abstract

This chapter engages racial discourse by linking the concept of signifying to the men and women in “The Demonstrators” who represent the African American community. The interaction between the black characters in “The Demonstrators,” especially when individuals who do not bare a cultural kinship to them are present, possesses an ancestral link to the African heritage in which the community is inherently steeped. In a textual moment that appears anticlimactic, members of the African American community of Holden demonstrate resistance to the intrusion of dominant culture through use of the age-old concept of signifying.