Racial Identity in the Ishmael Reed Imagination

Racial Identity in the Ishmael Reed Imagination

Racial relations is a notoriously difficult entity to deconstruct without invading the sensitivities of affected communities. In Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, clear racial groups are at the mercy of the author’s prose—not only the African-American diaspora but also Western culture and politics, institutions that Reed heavily satirize. The dissection of these two communities, however, has been historically prevalent—what does Mumbo Jumbo, written in 1971 and during the emergence of contemporary hip-hop, add to the mix? To understand Reed’s motive behind the complexities of Mumbo Jumbo requires an anatomical glance at the racial motifs he presents—or perhaps, reinvents.

At the beginning of chapter 26, Papa LaBas enters Abdul Hamid’s office and sees a series of “amusing lampoons carved in wood, ivory, and cast in bronze… [depicting] Whites who went into Africa seeking skins, ivory… and furs” (Reed 96). Additionally, Reed satirically describes how “[Americans] only appreciated heavy, serious works” while the African race is reduced to “glumness, depression, surliness…” (96). These descriptions of artifacts and the intellectuality of Westerns as opposed to the inability of Africans are injected with a unconventional criticism of interracial relations. With Reed, a black writer speaking on the hypervisibility of African-Americans amid the oppression imposed by Americans, we as readers are forced to call into question of why the lampoons embody American stereotypes of colonization and enslavement instead of uplifting the African-American race.

Perhaps this is Reed’s intention—”flipping the script” to unconventionally throw the dominant oppressors into hypervisibility. Historically, African representation by white historians has been stereotypically inflated; we see black women as victims of oversexualization in texts and unknowingly conform to societal norms of associating Black men with the lexicon of violence. After all, these disproportionate descriptions draw in readers and pull in profits—albeit at the heavy expense of one particular group. However, by throwing Western culture into hypervisibility instead, Reed defiantly refuses to accept the power disparity prevalent within historiography. Unconventionality in Mumbo Jumbo is wielded as a sword to attack pre-existing notions that oversimplify stereotypes, not a shield to stand behind and peer at the muddle of racial relations.