Mumbo Gumbo: an essay on Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972)

• Published in: Transition (Kampala, Uganda) Uganda), 2013-01 (111), p.90-188
• Main Author: Bell, Madison Smartt
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African American literature; American literature; Attitudes; Audiences; Autobiographical literature; Black people; Christianity; Civil rights movements; Civil war; Consumers; Cotton; Eco, Umberto (1932-2016); Foreign policy; McKay, Claude (1890-1948); Middle class; Race relations; Radio; Reed, Ishmael (1938- ); Vietnam War; War; World War I; Writers
• ISSN: 0041-1191; 1527-8042
• DOI: 10.2979/transition.111.90

Popular demonstrations were helping to bring an end to the Vietnam War, and the Civil Rights Movement had won important victories, while losing a good number of its leaders along the way. Or, who knows, there might have been dozens of hilarious black writers during this period, but they would have had trouble finding an audience, due to U.S. publishing's conviction that black people don't buy books-a belief not reversed for another twenty years, when Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale (1992) discovered a healthy black middle-class audience with tastes of its own. [...]American publishing supported black authors it thought white customers wanted to read; at the time Ishmael Reed finished Mumbo Jumbo, that spectrum was relatively narrow, ranging fromJames Baldwin's out-whiting whitey gravitas to the tempered fury of a Malcolm X. Reed satirizes the trend in the attitude of the character Hinkle Von Vampton, white publisher of a periodical called The Benign Monster, who mocks black writers "panhandling tear-jerking pitiful autobiographies on the radio, wringing them for every cheap emotion they can solicit." "An antiJes' Grew President, Warren Harding" has been elected "on the platform 'Let's be done with Wiggle and Wobble,"'a slogan whose reference Reed adapts from foreign policy to Jes' Grew dance crazes. Or as Carl Jung put it: "The catastrophe of the first World War and the extraordinary spiritual malaise that came afterwards were needed to arouse a doubt as to whether all was well with the white man's mind." [...]the 1920s reflected what the 1960s also were: two periods of hazardous, fertile instability.