“We will make our own future Text”: Allegory, Iconoclasm, and Reverence in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Roxanne Harde

Pages 361-377 | Published online: 26 Mar 2010

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 
Volume 43, 2002 - Issue 4

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https://doi.org/10.1080/00111610209602190


Abstract

After seeking the Book of Thoth throughout Mumbo Jumbo, PaPa LaBas, the novel's priest-detective-reader, discovers that the precious Text of the Work has been destroyed. Equal parts detective novel, conspiracy thriller, black manifesto, theological tract, exhibition catalogue, and alternative history, Mumbo Jumbo works allegorically with each of these, its pretexts. In addition, the novel grounds each pretext in icon and sets for each its own object of particular admiration, its own representative symbol. Having found the symbol at the center of each pretext, the novel then transforms its use of allegory into iconoclasm and attacks the symbol and worship behind the icon.1 Still, Mumbo Jumbo's impulse is not that of the fascist, to do away with history in the name of history, but rather to revise, to breathe new life into language. If allegory clings to things, then Reed, as iconoclast, deflates the thing with the allegory and destroys to rebuild by using the corpse of the old text as his locus of new meaning.2 I argue that Mumbo Jumbo is a tightly controlled allegory that draws from modernism its weapons, from postmodernism its tools, and negotiates, within the form, a hermeneutic of reverence for language's spiritual impulse.

The Grapevine Telegraph "Jes Grew": Sonic Materialism, Afrofuturism and Information Theory in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Myungsung Kim

https://doi.org/10.3138/topia.39.05

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Abstract

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo situates the history of African American culture in the language of genetics, information theory, biocultural evolutionism and sonic/vibrant materialism. Reed's motif of “Jes Grew,” as an evolving acoustic entity vibrant through radio technology, signifies a codified medium of information storage and transfer; it stores and transfers black cultural information in a viral form, articulating it to the physicality and orality of the antebellum grapevine telegraph. Such a biosonic construction of African American experience provides fertile terrain to explore the marginalization and rehabilitation of black ontological forces. By dramatizing the production and transmission of black tonality, Reed's trope of “Jes Grew” signals vibrational forces that counteract Western, white cultural norms. Thus Mumbo Jumbo's trope of the Jes Grew virus participates in, and advances, the aesthetic politics of Afrofuturism, in which Jes Grew's bio-sonic effects enable us to contest the narrow humanism of Eurocentric biopolitics with an Afrofuturist sonic materialism. By the same token, the novel's description of 1920s Harlem revolves around an epistemological framework of modern technoculture in which biological research becomes a textualization of nature and DNA becomes an information storage and transfer system. Mumbo Jumbo perceives the biological human body as an outcome of dynamic interactions in which information networks and social, cultural and biological relations are scripted in textual and coded platforms of sonic materialism.

Roman d'Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo ancre l'histoire de la culture afro-américaine à la croisée de la génétique, de la théorie de l'information, de l'évolutionnisme bioculturel et d'un matérialisme sonore dynamique. Nous y croisons le « Jes Grew », une entité acoustique mouvante qui circule par technologie radio. En fait, c'est un moyen codifié d'emmagasiner les renseignements de la culture noire et de les faire circuler de manière virale, leur conférant la dimension à la fois orale et physique du bouche à oreille de l'époque de la guerre de Sécession. Cette construction biosonore de l'expérience afro-américaine est un terrain fertile pour qui veut explorer la marginalisation et la restauration des forces ontologiques noires. En métaphorisant ainsi la production et la transmission d'une tonalité noire, le Jes Grew nous indique que des forces vives tentent de faire contrepoids aux normes culturelles de l'homme blanc occidental. Ainsi, ce virus au cœur de Mumbo Jumbo sert la politique esthétique de l'afrofuturisme : ces effets biologiques des sons, c'est le matérialisme sonore qui remet en question l'humanisme étroit d'une biopolitique eurocentriste. Par ailleurs, la description du Harlem des années 1920 que propose le roman exploite l'épistémologie de la technoculture moderne, où la recherche biologique devient mise en texte de la nature et l'ADN, un système de stockage et de transfert d'information. Ainsi, pour Mumbo Jumbo, le corps humain biologique est le résultat d'interactions dynamiques, les réseaux d'information et les relations sociales, culturelles et biologiques s'incarnant sur les plateformes textuelles et codifiées du matérialisme sonore.

Keywords : Ishmael Reed, Afrofuturism, bioinformatics, biopolitics, sonic materialism, black ontology