Highbrow and Low-down: The Novels of Ishmael Reed

Session Coordinators: Steve Almquist / Justin St.Clair

Department of English, University of Iowa

308 English Philosophy Building, Iowa City, IA 52242

steven-almquist@uiowa.edu / justin-stclair@uiowa.edu

A Legacy of “Highbrow and Low-down”: The Text and the City in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist

While interviewing novelist Colson Whitehead, Laura Miller of Salon.com suggests that the postmodernism of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon is “literary territory that isn’t usually associated with black writers.” Miller’s comment leads Whitehead to reply that many fail to recognize a tradition of black postmodernist writers. As Whitehead explains to his interviewer, his own work emerges from a tradition of black postmodernism, one that the mainstream literary establishment continues to ignore. Whitehead says, “I think Ishmael Reed has done it—‘Mumbo Jumbo’ and ‘Flight to Canada’ are in the same sort of vein, I think he’s overlooked as a groundbreaking voice in black fiction . . . I think it’s always been there, it’s just that mainstream critics, maybe even readers, don’t see the linkages.”

In this paper, I investigate the “linkages” between Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, focusing primarily on how the two novels illustrate a particular emphasis on the roles of “the text” and “the city” in African-American culture. My paper examines The Intuitionist with the aim of understanding its debt to Mumbo Jumbo. I propose that the concepts of “the text” and “the city” in the two novels reveal the “highbrow and low-down” as an integral element of Reed’s legacy to African-American postmodernism, even as this “highbrow and low-down” tradition remains largely invisible to mainstream literary culture.

Anne Langendorfer

The Ohio State University

langendorfer.2@osu.edu

Questioning Commodification, Restoring the Aesthetic: The Re-Appropriation of the Slave Narrative in Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada

In her book, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks addresses the problematic relationship between “postmodernism and its relevance to black folks” (hooks 23). While several postmodern discourses center on the “recognition of Otherness,” these same discourses are directed toward “a specialized audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it clams to challenge” (hooks 25). Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel, Flight to Canada, addresses this schism between a unique subject position and the dominant aesthetic ideal.

Flight to Canada serves as Ishmael Reed’s attempt to re-appropriate slave narratives from the dominant white culture and re-contextualize these narratives for a twentieth-century African American audience. Flight to Canada recounts the exploits of Raven Quickskill, a fugitive slave turned famous poet, in a narrative that questions where “fact begins and fiction leaves off” (Reed 10). As Quickskill makes his way to the Canadian border, Reed invokes historical figures, the common themes and tropes of slave narratives, and the fusion of high and low culture common to postmodern narratives, to create a critique of the commodification of African American art by mainstream American culture. In this sense, Flight to Canada mirrors Linda Hutcheon’s definition of parody found in The Politics of Postmodernism, as Reed “both legitimizes and subverts” the major themes of his novel (Hutcheon 101). Through this parody, Reed rejects the appropriative influence of the dominant white culture on slave narratives, and restores the legitimacy of slave narratives as the cornerstone of African American literature.

Dan Jones

University of South Dakota

dgjones@usd.edu

Confronting the “Slave Traders’ Language” in the Multicultural Academy: Ishmael Reed’s Satirical Use of Kiswahili in Japanese by Spring

In Japanese by Spring, Ishmael Reed takes satirical aim at the factional multiculturalisms of the American academy. His main character, “Chappie” Puttbutt, is a black professor at the predominantly white Jack London College, and Chappie is willing to do anything to secure his tenure. He has even taken a crash course in Japanese, preparing for the subsequent takeover of the college by his Japanese-language tutor. While Reed’s novel satirizes much about the academy, in this paper I propose to pay particular attention to his representation of Kiswahili and Yoruba as rival languages in the hands of African-American ideologues at the college. Amidst the turmoil and fear of the “Japanese takeover,” Japanese by Spring provides a humorous and insightful portrayal of the ideological conflict among African Americans seeking a linguistic connection to Africa. Kiswahili is by far the predominant African language taught in American academies, but in Reed’s novel it is described as the language of slave traders. On the other hand, Yoruba is championed as the true language of African-American ancestors and the novel ends with a scene in a Yoruba temple, replete with Yoruba-language songs. In this paper, I offer a critical analysis of Reed’s use of these two African languages in the context of his broader critique of academia’s politics.

Steve Almquist

University of Iowa

steven-almquist@uiowa.edu

“Plug in Your Head”: Ishmael Reed on Radio’s Centralizing Address

In her book Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952, Michele Hilmes recasts Benedict Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” by arguing that radio culture was more adept even than print culture had been at unifying national consciousness. “The fundamental questions posed to the U.S. public by broadcasting’s centralizing address” in the early decades of radio, Hilmes claims, were, “Who are we?” and “Who are we not?” (230).

Focusing predominantly on Ishmael Reed’s 1969 novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, this paper traces Reed’s investigations into that same territory. Set in and around the town of Yellow Back Radio, the novel is at once an irreverent lampoon of American culture and a serious critique of radio’s centralizing address. From the mysterious “Old Woman” who scripts the ideas of the adult townsfolk from her broadcast studio in the hotel, to the Loop Garoo Kid who takes over the station, broadcasts “strange fixes” and “lays a trick” on the town, the novel considers the power of radio both to control discourse and to delimit identity.

Justin St.Clair

University of Iowa

justin-stclair@uiowa.edu