Black Literary History and the Problem of Identification in Ishmael Reed’sMumbo Jumbo

Abstract

AbstractPublished in 1972 at the dawn of the institutionalization of African American Studies, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo—a novel about cultural awakening, appropriation, and shifting power relations—may be read as an anticipatory fantasy of how a then emergent field would come to recount and mythologize its origins. The novel celebrates the Harlem Renaissance as the beginning of the African American literary tradition even as it invokes an ancient African inheritance and looks ahead to the political–artistic foment of Reed’s contemporary moment. This chapter reassesses Reed’s vision for a nascent field and interprets his turn to Harlem as a provocative alternative to the now ubiquitous African Americanist discourse on slavery and trauma. It considers how Mumbo Jumbo constructs its suggestively contradictory conceptualization of Blackness through vying logics of (authentic, racial) identity and (unwieldy, psychoanalytic) identification. The novel’s profound ambivalence about the project of institutionalization complicates its enthusiastic call for the historical recovery of an African American artistic tradition.