Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo as Neo-Hoodoo Detective Fiction: A Bhabhaesque Mimicry of Mimetic Eurocentric Representation

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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331820725_Ishmael_Reed's_Mumbo_Jumbo_as_Neo-Hoodoo_Detective_Fiction_A_Bhabhaesque_Mimicry_of_Mimetic_Eurocentric_Representation

December 2016

Zohreh Ramin

Farshid Nowrouzi

The relationship between dominators and the dominated has always been strained. Naturally, dominators struggle to bolster their grip on power and the dominated try to resist the prevalent hegemony. Before the rise of postmodernism in the second half of the twentieth century, the oppressed groups mostly resorted to direct violent confrontation with the supremacists in an attempt to undermine the discriminatory hierarchy. Nevertheless, postmodernism caused a drastic metamorphosis in the survival strategies adopted by the subalterns. Likewise, recent postcolonial critics have opted for a different plan of action than the costly and ruinous choice of violence. Homi Bhabha, for instance, posits the notion of mimicry to combat the hegemonic and repressive discourses. According to the Indian thinker, mimicry is the playful and subversive imitation of the dominant norms and discursive practices carried out only to puncture the autocratic power structure. Ishmael Reed, the contemporary African American writer, employs Bhabha's recommended strategy of mimicry in many of his works. In his renowned novel Mumbo Jumbo, he mimics the classic genre of detective fiction and its mimetic mode of realistic representation in order to divulge the contradictions and discriminations embedded in the Western thought system. Reed's aesthetics also attempts to promote the black hoodoo tradition as an eclectic system to counter the "Atonist" weltanschauung. This paper tries to analyze Reed's revisionist strategies in Mumbo Jumbo and how they dismantle both the novel of detection (as a cherished genre in the Western literary canon) and the Eurocentric worldview.