Wednesday October 7, 2020

Ishmael Reed’s depiction of race in his novel Mumbo Jumbo avoids essentialism by emphasizing culture and religion as collectively authored, orally-transmitted utterances — sayings that can be played with, jazzed with, riffed upon. Figures like Papa LaBas and Black Herman exist eternally, as do the novel’s Knights Templar characters. They possess a magical capacity, remaining of fixed age, archetypal, unchanging across the ages, as joyous people, the Jes Grews, battle the forces of repression, the monotheists, the Atonists.