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David Foster Wallace, letter to Bonnie Nadell (5 July 1989)This article evaluates David Foster Wallace and Mark Costello's
Signifying Rappers in terms of its contribution to both early hip-hop and whiteness studies, as well as positioning the text in relation to Wallace's career. First, the article traces many of Wallace's subsequent thematic concerns and literary techniques back to this early text, locating the origin of some of his most characteristic stylistic devices within
Signifying Rappers. Ultimately, this retrospective reading shows that far from being a mere curiosity piece in Wallace's corpus, radically disconnected from anything he published either before or after, a close interrogation of
Signifying Rappers enriches our understanding of Wallace's work, revealing an oblique vision of Wallace striving to articulate a personal artistic agenda in response to the postmodern literary tradition. The essay proceeds to address Wallace and Costello's uncanny presaging of many of the preoccupations of institutional hip-hop and whiteness studies, offering an extended interpretation of the text in light of these disciplines. This analysis also explores representations of race within Wallace's work more generally, as well as addressing the underlying reasons behind the obscure status of
Signifying Rappers within these two related fields.