Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed

The Unseen Book Club

Mumbo Jumbo is a “Neo-Hoodoo” detective story, a post-modern satire, a touchstone of Afro-futurist fiction, and an invocation of the artistic and spiritual rebelliousness of Harlem, New Orleans, and Haiti in the 1920s into the time of its writing in 1972. In its account of the nefarious attempts of the centuries-old white, Western conspiratorial orders seeking to stamp out a literally infectious dance craze spread by ragtime and jazz, Ishmael Reed satirizes the spiritual vacuity of monotheistic European civilization and attacks recuperative forces in the world of art and criticism.

We read Mumbo Jumbo in dialogue with Cedric J. Robinson’s classic work, Black Marxism, which turned out to be a particularly useful parallel reading. In Black Marxism, Robinson traces the current world system to its roots in medieval Europe and proposes the Black radical tradition as a legacy of resistance that is ontologically opposed to racial capitalism.

Intro, outro, and interstitial music excerpted from two records by the musical project Conjure: 'Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed' (1984) and 'Bad Teeth' (2005).

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Art by Eli Liebman: https://elimack.weebly.com/