Infecting the Academy: How Reconfigured Thought Jes Grew from Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. (2011)

PIATKOWSKI, PAUL DAVID, M.A.https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/Piatkowski_uncg_0154M_10848.pdf

73 pp.

The world of academic study and university education privileges a so-called
“global” process of thinking as universal, but this process actually relies on practices with
a European centrality. This thinking process gets taught to individuals and “programs”
the manner of thinking for the majority of the world’s population, serving a neocolonial
purpose in global conversations. After first revealing that Western civilization’s
institutions of learning propagate a disorienting perspective for other ethno-cultural
viewpoints, Ishmael Reed utilizes a discursive process called Jes Grew that parasitically
rewrites the institutionalized hegemony of the Western academy and its influence on the
arts, thoughts, and actions of other ethno-cultural groups.

In his novel Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed uses Jes Grew, a type of infovirus, to
recode both the reader of the text and the academy itself through de-centering and
deconstructing academic practices and texts of Western civilization, and then
reconstructing and rewriting these into a more fluid, unbound academic system not
circumscribed within the confines of Eurocentric hegemony. Reed accomplishes this task
with the construction and implementation of Jes Grew that he first seeds in the imaginary
and then extends out into physical, lived reality. Through a deconstruction of the physical
and fictional text and an analysis of Reed’s structural approach in Mumbo Jumbo, it
becomes clear that his target hosts for Jes Grew infection are academic readers. Reed
begins his process by shifting a European paradigm to an African one, and through this
process he de-centers the “universal” centrality of Western culture. Reed’s Jes Grew
rewrites thinking into a system of thought that equally privileges multiple ethno-cultural
viewpoints by de-centering and deconstructing the infected reader and re-centering the
academic manner of processing information. This process de-privileges a Western
manner of thinking and creates, instead, a fluid, unbound method of processing
knowledge. Jes Grew reconfigures thinking itself in a manner that decolonizes the global
psyche