The purpose of this research is to analyze the discursive function of the aesthetic concept of Africa in selected poems of key Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett and Countee Cullen. Based on Henry Louis Gates's theory of "Signifyin(g)" and on semiotics more broadly, it is possible to show that the use of biblical, Enlightenment and Romanticist tropes in these poems does not reflect a desire to evade racial stigma and please white elite audiences but effects a displacement of meaning aimed at invalidating the racist discourses that have shaped the mainstream imagination of African ancestry in Western society.