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).