Ishmael Reed's mumbo jumbo through confucianism

Yupei Zhou

pp. 157-175

in: Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed), Cross-cultural visions in African American literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo has been widely accepted as a postmodern novel. Most critics define the novel as postmodern on the basis that it is, both formally and thematically, a postmodern deconstruction of modern epistemology and politics and that it offers and experiments with artistic forms and epistemological paradigms alternative to the modern categorization of African American art and African Americans as the other. For most critics, the formal implies, explicates, expresses, or mediates the epistemological. The formal and the epistemological constitute a multicultural as well as oppositional discourse. As W. Lawrence Hogue states, "deconstructing the novel becomes a metaphor for deconstructing metaphysics' for Reed ("Postmodernism" 182). Hogue's discussion of Mumbo Jumbo's paradigm of postmodern epistemology takes the formal as his analytic framework. Likewise, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. points out that Mumbo Jumbo, by way of such formal strategies as pastiche, parody, doubling, and signifying, not only revises the Western idea of writing and reading but also critiques "the notions of closure" that are both obvious in Western metaphysics and "implicit in the key texts of the Afro-American canon" (226–27).