The political conspiracies of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Historical relativism and the contemporary battle for power

by

Benjamin Clark Bishop, Jr.

A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Major: English (Literature)

AN AMERICAN EVANGELICAL PROTESTANT INTERPRETS MUMBO JUMBO
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8109&context=rtd

TABLE OF CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION 1


THE POLITICAL CONSPIRACY 13


THE MASONIC CONSPIRACY 36


THE LITERARY AND ART CONSPIRACY 44


CONCLUSION 53

WORKS CITED 57




Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and the Uses of Parody

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
Published 1991 8 Pages
https://www.academia.edu/3670280/Ishmael_Reeds_Mumbo_Jumbo_and_the_Uses_of_Parody

PERFORMANCE, HISTORY, AND MYTH: THE PROBLEM OF ISHMAEL REED'S "MUMBO-JUMBO"
Theodore O. Mason, Jr.
Modern Fiction Studies
Vol. 34, No. 1, SPECIAL ISSUE: MODERN BLACK FICTION (Spring 1988), pp. 97-109
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26282406
Page Count: 13
Topics: Novels, United States history, Cultural history, Modern literature, Literary criticism, Selective employment taxes, Writers, Historicity, Verisimilitude

Laughter and Identity in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo
Sharon A. Jessee
MELUS, Volume 21, Issue 4, December 1996, Pages 127–139, https://doi.org/10.2307/467645
Published:
01 December 1996

Ishmael Reed and the postmodern slave narrative

Glen Anthony Harris

Comparative American Studies An International Journal

Volume 5, 2007 - Issue 4

Published online: 18 Jul 2013

Postmodernism, Traditional Cultural Forms, and the African American Narrative: Major’s Reflex, Morrison’s Jazz, and Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo 

W. LAWRENCE HOGUE

Novel (2002) 35 (2-3): 169–192.

https://doi.org/10.2307/1346182

Playing with Expectations

Postmodern Narrative Choices and the African American Novel

Series: 

• Modern American Literature

Preston Park Cooper

Playing with Expectations: Postmodern Narrative Choices and the African American Novel explores a merging of works by African American novelists to promote critical acceptance of postmodern literature and advance the legitimacy and usefulness of postmodern literary techniques. This book examines novels by Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and Toni Morrison, and two novels by comparative newcomer Colson Whitehead – all of whom have used postmodern techniques not only to help their work be read, but to gain a racially wide audience that is open, willing, and able to understand.
Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of local narratives and grand narratives helps show how African American novels, using postmodern strategies, function as small-scale narratives. Consequently, these narratives, set up in opposition to hegemonic metanarratives, offer readers an alternative mode of thinking to that offered by the larger, more widely diffused and self-distributing grand narratives. By providing realistic characters in ways that defy the typical grand narratives of race, as well as the expectations of storytelling itself, readers are stimulated into new realizations about previously accepted ideas, and become prepared to spread the now-realized truth about the inaccuracies of the racist grand narratives.
This book is a vital and thought-provoking addition to the ongoing conversation about storytelling and race, and will engage readers in classroom discussions dealing with race, postmodernism, or twentieth-century literature in a more general sense. Show Less

Book (EPUB)

ISBN:

978-1-4541-9093-6

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1541-7

Availability:

Available

Subjects:

1. English Literature and Culture

Formats:

1. EPUB
2. PDF
3. Hardback

•  

  Multicultural noise and Ishmael Reed's “Mumbo Jumbo”

  Westerfield, Dean.California State University, Long Beach, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2005. 1426967.  https://search.proquest.com/openview/180a18c8aaa728f5ccb16734439ab197/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y
• 
  
• https://search.proquest.com/openview/180a18c8aaa728f5ccb16734439ab197/1.pdf?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Rethinking Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo: Neo-Hoodoo ...

https://kameelahmartin.files.wordpress.com › neohoodoo-womanist-text

RETHINKING ISHMAEL REED'S MUMBO JUMBO: NEO-HOODOO WOMANIST TEXT? Northward and Cityward: Re-reading Literature of the Great Migration.

Jazz and Signifying in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu › cgi › viewcontent

by K Wheeler - ‎2014 - ‎Related articles

Riffing on The Past: Jazz and Signifying in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo ... read either Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo, or a number of venomously racist articles, ... inspection”—many can be read for meaning that pertains to Reed's ...

A CASEBOOK STUDY OF ISHMAEL REED’S
YELLOW BACK RADIO BROKE-DOWN

EDITED BY PIERRE-DAMIEN MVUYEKURE
❖
Dalkey Archive Press Casebook Study Series
Robert L. McLaughlin, Managing Editor
© Center for Book Culture, 2003
All rights reserved
www.centerforbookculture.org

A Casebook Study of Ishmael Reed’s
Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
Edited by Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/YellowBackCasebook.pdf

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: “Scatting Arbitrarily” and Blowing Hoodoo
[Western] like Charlie “Bird” Parker: Loop Garoo’s Be-bop/
HooDoo Improvisations in Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
PIERRE-DAMIEN MVUYEKURE................................................ 1
Westward Migration, Narrative, and Genre in African America
DAVID G. NICHOLLS ............................................................. 32
The Borg, Conjure, and Voodoo: An Analysis of Yellow Back
Radio Broke-Down
SCHARRON A. CLAYTON ....................................................... 51
Regeneration through Neo-Hoodooism: Yellow Back Radio
Broke-Down and Ishmael Reed’s Mythogenesis
AIMABLE TWAGILIMANA ...................................................... 88
Selected Bibliography ................................................................. 115

Notes on Contributors................................................................. 119

'Many Places At Once': The Memory of Africa in John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire
John Edgar Wideman's 1990 novel Philadelphia Fire, like Song of Solomon, barely
mentions the word' Africa', indicating a memory which does not readily signify in
language, and whose continuity with language may be interrupted by the trauma of an
unspeakable history. The novel reflects upon the problems of narrating in the context
of a global modernity which relies upon forgetfulness of the past, and positions an
African form of memory as a medium which is better disposed than a linear narrative
form often is, to enable a connection with the past and its forgotten casualties. This
form of memory occurs in the context of what Wideman describes as:
the Great Time of our African ancestors, a nonlinear, atemporal medium in which all
things that ever have been, are, or will be mingle freely, the space that allows us to
bump into relatives long dead or absent friends or children unborn as easily, as
significantly, as we encounter the people in our daily lives. l
The form of memory which Wideman thus positions as 'African', perceives the past
as alive in the present, and allows narrative to be defined by memory, whereas an
American tradition, the novel suggests, would always attempt to make memory
submit to narrative.

The novel moves around the historical event of a fire which burned, on 13 May 1985,
in the middle of a black neighbourhood in West Philadelphia, killing eleven people
and leaving 262 others homeless. The fire was the result of the City of Philadelphia
police's decision to drop a satchel of explosive onto a house in which members of an
organisation called MOVE were living, and was the horrific culmination of a yearslong wrangle between MOVE and the City, in which six adult members of the group
and five of their children died under bombardment of gunfire, water cannon and
explosives. Two people, a woman named Ramona Africa, and a nine-year old boy,
Birdie Africa, escaped the fire alive, and a large part of Wideman's novel is told from
the perspective of protagonist Cudjoe, who has just returned to Philadelphia from selfexile in the Greek islands, motivated by a quest for "the story he crossed an ocean to
find. Story of a fire and a lost boy that brought him home".2
 As Cudjoe plans to "writ [ e] a book [ ... ] about the fire. What caused it. Who was responsible. What it means." (19), he interviews Margaret Jones, a character who is described by Wideman as a "former member of my group - the group inside the book who parallels or figures the actual MOVE organization".3 Jones challenges Cudjoe's faith in the
power of narrative to heal or resolve the trauma of memory as she says, bluntly:
"Don't need no book. Anybody wants to know what it means, bring them through
here. Tell them these bombed streets used to be full of people's homes. Tell them
babies' bones mixed up in this ash they smell." (19) When Cudjoe protests, "1 want
to do something about the silence." (19), he reveals himself to be insensitive to the
form of memory which Jones has just made explicit for him - the memory which
exists in everyday life, a present in which the past is felt and known at every moment.
What bothers Cudjoe most of all is the problem of narrating an unspeakable memory,
and he must, through the course of the novel, discover a way of reconciling himself to
this discomfort.

1 John Edgar Wideman, 'Preface', The Homewood Books, (Pittsburgh & London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), p xi. 

2 John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (London: Picador, 1995 [1]

CONTINUE READING CHAPTER FOUR
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4110/1/WRAP_THESIS_Kamali_2007.pdf

Spectres of the Shore: The Memory of Africa in
Contemporary African-American and Black British
Fiction
by
Leila Francesca Kamali
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for
the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In

English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick,
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

May 2007 

'Fits For Your Head': The Memory of Africa in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo mobilises a history of culture which

recognises African antecedents to a specific African-American tradition, but as this

history of culture focuses on the notion of 'possession', as exemplified by the Afrodiasporan system of voodoo, the notion that an African history could constitute a history

of' origins' is revealed to be rather ridiculous. The figure of being 'possessed', or of

'going out of one's head' is used equally well in this novel to indicate vodoun rites as it is

to signify the function of memory, and similarly, emphasises the fluidity of any perceived

'difference' between these concepts. Reed's figure of 'Jes Grew' may be imagined to be

a collective term for possessive forces, as well as for the state of being possessed, and

while it is linked to a tradition specific to African-American, Caribbean and African

cultures, it is also a state which may be known to anyone who is able to present the right

frame of mind to receive it. As a memory of Africa can be 'remembered' within the

terms of a linear history, then, memory also functions as 'possessive' action, allowing a

connection to Africa to arise at any given moment. Reed draws a history of culture back

to Ancient Egypt in this novel, thereby presenting a tradition, but at the same time sends

up any tendency to attach this tradition to the sign of 'blackness', as indicative of a

narrow, "Atonist", notion of signification which perceives the relationship between

language and memory as purely linear. Reed makes a profoundly comic commentary

upon the notion of African 'origins' here, as he situates Africa not as the site of the

33 

origins of African diasporan culture, but of the' Atonist' perspective itself which he

figures as a particularly Euro-American neurosis toward tradition and the past.

As the novel's "anti-plague",l Jes Grew is figured in the novel as both a distinct tradition

and a possessive force which appears in discrete historical moments, and Reed "turn[s] to

Egypt not just as proof of a black African past but as a model for contemporary

spirituality and culture", and imagines "each moment [ ... ] in a kind of continuous

awareness of and interdependence with the others".2 In this novel which spoofs the hardboiled detective story genre,3 not least by drawing 'back to Africa' an extremely

convoluted history of a plague which manifests itself in instances of "suggestive bumping

and grinding" and "wild abandoned spooning" (22), Reed must be seen to be responding

with laughter to earnest attempts to discover something 'meaningful' about culture by

way of deciphering histories of 'origins'. So J es Grew is shown to characterise the 1920s

'Harlem Renaissance' - "The Blues is a Jes Grew, as James Weldon Johnson surmised.

Jazz was a Jes Grew which followed the Jes Grew of Ragtime. Slang is a Jes Grew too."

(214) It is also shown to be both a repetition of and a parallel to previous eras, as the end

of the novel also depicts the 1970s as a time when "Jes Grew was [again] latching onto

its blood" (216), and its lineage is furthermore charted to an Ancient Egyptian "theater 

accompanying [ ... ] agriculturalists' rites" (161). Even as Jes Grew is shown to be

illustrative of an African-American and African tradition, it is also a possessive force-

"'Jes Grew is life" (204) itself - and the novel shows that it can arise at any given

moment, and is available to anyone who presents the frame of mind to receive it. The

memory of Africa is thus felt to be intrinsic to an African-American tradition, to be the

site of a form of life depicted as 'natural', and yet also to be the site of a confrontation

between a fluid form of memory, and what is presented as the 'unnatural' attitudes

toward the past represented by Atonism. 

Reed's perspective in this novel is rooted in a tradition he calls "N eo Hoodoo because it doesn't begin with me", 4 and which is related to voodoo, which Reed regards as a "common language" which "not only united the Africans but also made it easier for them to forge alliances with those Native Americans whose customs were similar".5 Explaining that "hoodoo involved art [ ... ,]dancing, painting, poetry, it was multimedia",6 Reed understands it to be "what Black Americans came up with", "as opposed to Obeahism in Jamaica and other islands and Voodooism in Haiti", 7 but that it is still "based upon African forms of art". 8 For Reed, Helen Lock explains, Neo-HooDoo's purpose is to give new life to marginalized and apparently moribund cultural sensibilities, as Jes Grew had become, by fusing African and Euro-American  aesthetic traditions into a new African-American aesthetic, according to which orality and

literacy, past and present, fonn and spirit are all equally privileged, and cultural integrity

both preserved intact and enriched. "This is what my writing is all about. It leads me to

the places where I can see old cultures resurrected and made contemporary. Time past is

time present".

CONTINUE READING CHAPTER ONE
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/4110/1/WRAP_THESIS_Kamali_2007.pdf

Spectres of the Shore: The Memory of Africa in
Contemporary African-American and Black British
Fiction
by
Leila Francesca Kamali
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for
the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
In
English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick,
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

May 2007 

ISHMAEL REED BETWEEN AMIRI BARAKA 
AND GEORGE S. SCHUYLER

Ntongela Masilela
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/general/essays/reed.pdf

In an essay written from Oakland, "Ground Zero," the novelist Ishmael
Teed predicts that the time is fast approaching when the Black working
class - 'people who've suffered all manner of degradation so that their
children might become achievers' - will have to take the offensive against
'Black terrorists . . . the brutal crack fascists.' Comparing daily existence in
East Oakland to the oppression in Haiti under the Tontons Macoutes . . .

-Mike Davis, "Los Angeles: Civil Liberties between the Hammer
and the Rock," New Left Review

Ishmael Reed, one of America's premier novelists today, is a real paradox: in his
critical and cultural essays, assembled in SHROVETIDE IN OLD NEW
ORLEANS (1978) and in GOD MADE ALASKA FOR THE INDIANS:
SELECTED ESSAYS (1982), he is capable of making the most nonsensical
political and historical statements; yet in his very impressive novels, especially in
the great MUMBO JUMBO, one encounters a most lucid historical imagination
inhabiting complex literary figurations. It is presumably this incomparable novel
which impelled Fredric Jameson to place Reed among the leading postmodernist
writers, in company with John Ashbery and others. 1 Though the postmodernist
constituents in literature have still to be precisely located, defined and theorized,
one cannot accept Harold Bloom's scorn and dismissal of the concept of
postmodernism, substituting for it the continuation of Emersonian Romanticism.
MUMBO JUMBO is remarkable not only for its convoluted literary structure, but
also for its historicity, in that it articulates its postmodernist nature against the
modernism of HEART OF DARKNESS. Jameson in THE POLITICAL
UNCONSCIOUS has taught us that it was in Joseph Conrad that modernism
constelated towards its unity, and it was in him also that it began the elementary
configurations of its configurations. The historical imagination displayed in
MUMBO JUMBO is deep, in that it not only disputes and challenges Conrad's
interpretation of African history and African civilization, but it also attempts to
postulate the cultural unity of the African world (in Africa and in the diaspora).
Elsewhere, in the context of attempting a critique of Houston A. Baker's
poststructuralist reading of African-American modernism and Henry Louis
Gates' poststructuralist mapping of black American postmodernism, we
attempted to indicate the importance of this here postmodernist novel. Here our
concern is Reed's critical imagination, or really, its profound absence.
f
If the historical imagination is bristlingly present in MUMBO JUMBO, it is
insufficiently present in his literary essays. It is this insufficiency which has been
at the center of Reed's political and intellectual reaction , so much fashionable
with neo-conservatives, who nearly exercise cultural hegemony in political habits
is profoundly disconcerting to someone from the Third World, especially to this
black South African exile. For instance, in an address to a National Conference
of Afro-American Writers given on November 9, 1974 in Howard University,
Reed seriously postulates: "Marx recognized man's material needs, but he didn't
recognize man's psychic needs. That's why the people come up with a Nixon
from time to time---' cause Nixon knows more about the people than Marx did;
and I suggest that just because Marx spent twenty years in the library, doesn't
mean he's all that smart. I used to work in a library, and a lot of people just came
in to get warm." How can one possibly respond to this supposed intellectual
comparison! In which way Nixon had a better grasp of human history that Marx,
a superior understanding of human culture than Marx, a finer intellectual culture
than Marx. Such a mediocre talent; but Reed is a man of outstanding literary
abilities, who has written a great novel, and has a potential of being a very great
writer. It is not by chance that Derek Walcott, whom Joseph Brodsky considers
to be the greatest poet in the English language today, considers Ishmael Reed to
be a writer of the first rank. Clearly then, a writer of such formidable literary
abilities, who comes from an oppressed and dispossessed national group, has a
historical and intellectual responsibility to educate , as Ngugi was Thiongo and
Chinua Achebe so well understood over twenty years ago, in the middle 1960's.
By expressing such a supposedly serious intellectual estimation, Ishmael Reed
mis-educates Ameri-people, especially the African-Americans, who are already
disadvantageously placed within American 'culture', i.e., the American social
structure is predicated on the mis-educating of African-Americans. Reed merely
compounds the problem, instead of providing solutions to it. In other words,
Reed mis-educates on behalf of the American ruling class. His uncritical
invective against Marxism knows no limits, for in another context, he writes:
"Notice how Solzhenitsyn recently referred to Marxism as a Western idea. As
Ionesco recently pointed out, Marxism is rooted in the Christian tradition.
Solzhenitsyn's remarks can be interpreted as those of a Russian pagan getting
back at the Church of Rome. . . . His (a 'black' social realist critic) calling it 'cute'
was one of the events that convinced me that you can't apply the Marxist reading
to what is happening here in this country. . . ." This text, "Ishmael Reed---Self
Interview", is so fundamental to understanding Reed's political, intellectual and
literary consciousness, that it will be necessary to return to it later in this sketch.
Suffice to say for the moment, that Ionesco and Solzhenitsyn are hardly the
authorities one can take intellectually serious on the matter of historical
materialism, because of their rabid anti-Communism and deep hatred of Marxism
as an intellectual tradition. What knowledge of Marxism, since it seems to come
to him from third sources, yet his denunciation of this great intellectual tradition

is with the pretence of authoritativeness. 

Uprising in Storyville:
Conjuring Resistance in African-American

Literature

Tom Tàbori (University of Glasgow)

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_122693_smxx.pdf

‘[Ishmael] Reed’s rhetorical strategy assumes the form of the
relationship between the text and the criticism of that text, which
serves as discourse upon the text’ (Gates 1988, p.112). So speaks
Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his seminal text The Signifying Monkey,
harnessing, he believes, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of ‘inner
dialogisation’ (1988, p.112), or polemic hidden in parody. He does
this to argue the case for self-reflexivity as Mumbo Jumbo’s ‘form of
signifyin(g)’(Hurston 1990, cited in Gates 1988, p.113), the way in
which Reed riffs on the codes fielded in his text. However, what
Gates declines to explore are the discourses to which these codes
pertain, discourses that Reed summons like a conjuror, then
performs like a ventriloquist; the very social currents that lace his
America and are re-laced in his text. To avoid the connotation of
illusory, David Blaine-style conjuring, this essay will posit in its place
the term conjure, as it relates to the conjure man, a pervasive
archetype within African-American literature. He is both community
organiser and a reality re-organiser, conjuring uprising from what
already-exists, not out of the blue, and this conjure is present in the
works of Ishmael Reed, Rudolph Fisher, and Randolph Kenan
which this essay will examine.

Even after the sociality of conjure is returned, the radicalism
and reach of this ‘form of signifyin(g)’(Hurston 1990, cited in Gates
1988, p.113) is restricted by critics who file it away as Reed’s
idiosyncrasy, such as James Lindroth’s Images of Subversion and Helen 
Lock’s A Man's Story Is His Gris-gris (Lindroth 1996; Lock 1993). In
response, this essay will show that Reed’s ‘Neo-HooDoo, …the Lost
American Church’(2004b, p.2062), is part of a grander narrative of
conjure within African-American literature. 

To this end, the essay will look at the generations prior and successive 
to Reed, in order to fashion a theory of conjure as a narrative adapted
 to the uprootednessof a people hauled across the Atlantic: ‘we were
 dumped here on our own without the book to tell us who the Loas are, 
what we callspirits… [so] we made it all up on our own’ (Reed 1996, p.130).
African-American literature’s interiority to America levies the
commitment that is this essay’s first theme: giving the individual no
opt-out from the relationships of difference into which he is born,
and giving Reed the belief that ‘a black man is born with his guard
up’ (Reed 1990, epigraph). The second theme is parody itself, an act
of doubling involved in what Bakhtin calls ‘the reaccentuation of
images and languages (forms) in the novel’ (1981, p.59), essentially a
storytelling technique by which the past can be played and replayed,
memories conjured up to furnish the present, rather than one-way
bombardment, or Proustian moments. The third aspect of conjure
and the third theme of this essay is the act of occupying, as used by
the Loop Garew Kid in Reed’s Yellow-Back Radio Broke Down, when,
‘by making figurines of his victims he entraps their spirits and is able
to manipulate them’ (2000, p.60). Each theme makes a point about
decentredness, the relational subjectivity of those separated from their
origins by the Atlantic. Each theme remarks that decentredness does
not disable resistance but, rather, enables the double-voicing that can
negotiate such a compromised position. This is what lets the
conjuror stays focused behind enemy lines, behind the mask, as a
storyteller trapped in his own story, with access to a host of ciphers
for him to talk through, structures for him to ride on, and social 
apparatus on which ‘to swing up on freedom’(Malcolm X 2004,

track 21). 

ISHMAEL REED'S SUBVERSIVELY POTENT IMAGES
NARRATIVE STRATEGIES IN MUMBO-JUMBO AND JAPANESE BY SPRING

MICHAEL PRONKO 

The image of African−Americans has undergone a tremendous re−structuring
in the American novel over the past several decades. The methods of deconstructing
and reconstructing, no matter how one defines those terms, have been various and
substantial. Many writers have taken an aggressive approach in demanding a re−
evaluation of how “African−American” can be conceived and defined, while others
have taken a quasi−legalistic accounting of historical abuses that swing between the
self−righteous and the self−pitying. Of course, novels slip aside those descriptions
and often work with many approaches at once. One thing is certain, though, the
African−American novel has demolished former images and recreated compelling
new ones.

While some novelists feel politically misguided or relish accusative tones, in
general, African−American novelists write with circumspect care and keen awareness
of the images they create and promote. They know all too well how images shape
attitudes and actions in the real world. For the best writers, the intensity of their
overall creativity has not been hindered by this hyper−attention to images. Instead,
their creativity seems to flourish amid the often conflicting demands of setting the
record straight, expressing justifiable outrage, and forcing a fresh image into the
fray that works within the novel as a viable construct, within society as a criticism
and within culture as a potential new archetype. Few other groups of writers have
ever had to struggle with this particular burden of historical, social and narrative
claims to creative attention. Few other groups have been so successful.

Among the African−American writers of the post−war generation, Ishmael Reed
is one of the most compelling for the way he constructs the image of African−
Americans without foregoing a lively imagination, potent sense of humor and a
commitment to many ends at once. Like the trickster archetypes he draws on for
inspiration, Reed knows how to have a good time. He takes more than his share of
poetic liberties, exploits his narrative license and relishes post−modern ironic play.

He uses the past and the present as ironically as any African−American writer
working today. Of course, even the term “African−American” must be taken with a
spoonful of irony as Reed’s background and aims are a mish−mash of influences,
genetic and narrative, and of loyalties, progressive and entertaining.

In particular, his two novels, Mumbo Jumbo and Japanese by Spring take direct
aim at the confusing images of African−Americans by interrogating their deepest
structures and hidden interiors. He creates a fable of subversion in Mumbo Jumbo
(MJ) and a re−vamped Bildungsroman in Japanese by Spring (JBS). Both novels
seek to re−establish the image of African−Americans on far different foundations
than many of his contemporary novelists, and with more earnest intent disguised in
his playful exterior. He succeeds as much because of his sense of humor and narrative

strategies, as because of the righteousness of his cause.

CONTINUE READING HERE   https://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/gengobunka/bulletins/archive/pdf/2018/23MichaelPronko.pdf

Mumbo Jumbo: a dazzling classic finally gets the recognition it deserves

Praised by the likes of Tupac and Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed’s experimental novel about race in the US is, more than ever, a book for today

Jonathan McAloon  THE GUARDIAN  Wed 21 Aug 2019 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 1 AUGUST 2017
 

Immortal pertinence … detail from the cover art for the Penguin Modern Classic edition of Mumbo Jumbo. Illustration: Ishmael Reed/Penguin Random House

America, wrote Ishmael Reed in his 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, is “mercurial, restless, violent ... the travelling salesman who can sell the world a Brooklyn Bridge every day, can put anything over on you”.

Forty-five years later, Reed has performed a magic trick reminiscent of something found in that book, a dazzling novel about Voodoo, jazz and white supremacy: his personification of the US has taken a step beyond rhetoric and become flesh, in the mercurial, violent and restless salesman who is now America’s president.

Mumbo Jumbo, which has just been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, reeks of some kind of immortal pertinence. Reed has a certain immortality himself, as the author of novels, poetry, plays and music for more than 50 years. His work is embedded in every level of black culture in America. He has written about Muhammad Ali and Barack Obama; in turn, Tupac Shakur once rapped about him. (“My man Ishmael Reed” makes an appearance in Still I Rise.)

His 10 novels are, for the most part, subtle satires on race, worked into settings such as the OJ Simpson trials, a US civil war in which photocopiers exist and a wild west where cowboys wield laser guns. But Mumbo Jumbo is the most dazzling of them all. Set ostensibly in the 1920s, Reed’s novel follows conspiracy theories ranging backwards and forwards through time. A “plague” called Jes Grew has spread from New Orleans and caused half the country to dance recklessly, enjoy jazz and have a new appreciation for African American culture. Religious orders like the Knights Templar and the hi-tech Wallflower Order (responsible in Reed’s novel for the Depression and the US occupation of Haiti) seek to destroy an ancient Egyptian text that the Jes Grew may “want”.

Like jazz, the novel feels improvisatory and ambitious.

But Jes Grew is “an anti-plague”, the spirit of innovation and freedom of self-expression itself: “Jazz. Blues. The new thang … Your style.” Reed took a snatch of the preface to 1922’s The Book of American Negro Poetry, in which James Weldon Johnson says “the earliest Ragtime songs, like Topsy, ‘jes’ grew’” – they just happened – and turned it into a clever literary device that exposes people’s prejudice.


While some believe the media invented Jes Grew to sell papers, Harlem Voodoo priest Papa LaBas is drawn into the search for its ancient text. Unbeknown to him, a Muslim scholar has already found it, translated it and had it rejected by a publishing house. The slip is found next to his dead body: “The ‘Negro Awakening’ fad seems to have reached its peak and once more people are returning to serious writing … A Negro editor here said it lacked ‘soul’ and wasn’t ‘Nation’ enough.”

Made up of newspaper cuttings and party invites, handwritten notes and footnotes, contemporaneous and contemporary photographs, Mumbo Jumbo gives one a sense of Reed just using everything that captures his own imagination. This is exhilarating because, like jazz, the novel feels improvisatory and ambitious. Reed embraces ridiculousness, while lending the ridiculous weight. It is a funny book about conspiracy theories that nonetheless feels serious and true, encompassing potted histories of Voodun loas and the Crusades, essays on Christ’s laughter and the cotton trade (“Was it some unusual thrill at seeing the black hands come in contact with the white crop?”), and a postmodern alternative creation myth involving Osiris, Incas, Homer and Moses.

The weight of ideas, along with the time-hopping and slapstick, makes Reed’s book read like something by contemporary novelist Ned Beauman. Or rather, Beauman’s books feel at home in Reed’s lineage: Beauman takes his cue from Pynchon, and Pynchon admires Reed, even name-checking him in Gravity’s Rainbow: “Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you’ll ever find here.)”

Black history: Mumbo Jumbo and Paul Robeson – books podcast
https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2017/jul/25/black-history-mumbo-jumbo-and-paul-robeson-books-podcast

It is tempting to say that Mumbo Jumbo is “prophetic”, shining a spotlight on the US’s modern racial tensions: the vilification of the #blacklivesmatter movement, the sudden political prominence of white supremacists, Twitter outrage when Netflix commissions a show called Dear White People. But this would be patronising. The truth is that, since Reed saw his novel published in 1972, the world has changed very little. The only upshot is that we can read his work now with a similar urgency to what its first readers might have felt.

Yet there is a rightness to Mumbo Jumbo – already considered one of the best novels in the western canon by revered critic Harold Bloom – being canonised as a Penguin Classic a year after Paul Beatty’s Man Booker win for The Sellout, another philosophical and ingenious American race satire. As Papa LaBas says, Jes Grew is always there, always observable. But it flares up when “something is going on”. No one can deny, in the US today, that something is going on, and needed

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/aug/01/mumbo-jumbo-a-penguin-classic-2017-ishmael-reed

A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets

David Grundy
Bloomsbury Publishing, Feb. 7, 2019 - Literary Criticism - 280 pages

A vital hub of poetry readings, performance, publications and radical politics in 1960s New York, the Umbra Workshop was a cornerstone of the African American avant-garde.

Bringing together new archival research and detailed close readings of poetry, A Black Arts Poetry Machine is a groundbreaking study of this important but neglected group of poets. David Grundy explores the work of such poets as Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas and Calvin Hernton and how their innovative poetic forms engaged with radical political responses to state violence and urban insurrection. Through this examination, the book highlights the continuing relevance of the work of the Umbra Workshop today and is essential reading for anyone interested in 20th-century American poetry.

Contents

Amiri Baraka the Umbra Workshop and the Writing of Literary History	1
Umbra Internationalism and the Death of Lumumba	35
Amiri Barakas Magic Words	69
David Henderson Writes the City	99

Themes and Meanings

(LITERARY ESSENTIALS: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE)

https://www.enotes.com/topics/mumbo-jumbo/themes

As a novel of ideas and satirical criticism, Mumbo Jumbo works on a number of levels. Primarily, it is a postmodernist detective novel in the tradition of black detective fiction. It uses altered detective personas, black vernacular, double consciousness, and magic while parodying the detective form. Mumbo Jumbo’s metaphysical central mystery and its revisionist approach to history are additional indications of postmodern detective viewpoints.

On another level, it is a witty indictment of extreme behavior of all types. Characters representing many aspects of the ideological spectrum are shown to be buffoonish and narrow-minded. Abdul Hamid, sounding his clarion call of black power, is ridiculed in the end as a black puritan who burns the sacred text because it is, in his estimation, too lewd and scandalous.

On another level, the book suggests the ancient conflict between Eros and Thanatos. Put in its simplest terms, Mumbo Jumbo reflects humankind’s constant war with itself. On one side lie love and life, affirming revitalization; on the other side lie hate and self-destruction. Reed seems to suggest that the intensity of the conflict heightened as the world moved into the twentieth century.

The social and political structure of Western civilization, based on a death-seeking ethos, is portrayed as contemptible. An example of this occurs when the chief Atonist is overjoyed to see that the watercress darter has become extinct, further proof that the Atonist cause is winning the fight for control of the planet.

The continuous conflict between different ideologies and groups in the novel suggests a society as well as a world in conflict. Berbelang is a black revolutionary fighting the racist practices of institutions such as museums. There is even division among ranks, as the Knights Templar quarrel with the death-dealing Wallflower Order. Amid this chaos, there seem to be few manifestations of sanity and continuity.

A broad condemnation of Western civilization is constructed through the eyes of an educated, sensitive African American. The novel posits a positive approach to African American consciousness based on Afrocentric, not Eurocentric, worldviews. Reed accomplishes this by reinterpreting the entire history of Western civilization, redefining its myths and reconstructing its gods.

“Mumbo jumbo” in common vernacular suggests something unintelligible or mysterious. Reed concentrates instead on the positive aspects of the African mother tongue. Within the text itself, “mumbo jumbo” is defined as coming from the Mandingo language and means a “magician who makes the troubled spirits of ancestors go away.” Reed indicates by this example his intent to reconnect the African American community to African ancestors and to restore the African American identity by redefining the historical past.

Reed does this by creating, in this and other works, his own particular worldview, or Neo-HooDoo aesthetic, based on African American perception. Neo-HooDoo stresses the positive attributes of African American community and value systems. For example, PaPa LaBas is linked to the Haitian voodoo mysteries, since LaBas is a powerful Haitian spirit connected in turn to the ancient mysteries of African religion.

Reed’s revisionist interpretation establishes the Osiris/Set conflict at the very origins of human consciousness. Africa’s Egypt is seen in this sense as the progenitor of humankind, containing the seeds of both destruction and renewal. Jes Grew is Reed’s Neo-HooDoo terminology for the positive revitalization of the African American spirit that possesses the power to save all of humankind from total destruction. The term derives from James Weldon Johnson’s description of ragtime music and of the character of Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852): Both “jes’ grew.”

Positive attributes of African American culture are stressed through the repeated insertion of real figures from black history, black music, and..