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260 Part of what was at stake for N. Scott Momaday ’s work between 1967 and 1976, roughly coterminous with the cultural nationalism marking the first decade of the emerging paradigm of multiculturalism , was the problem of formulating a model for and substance of cultural continuity across many generations. That search for continuity was at stake for Momaday as a Kiowa, for his characters Abel as a Bahkyush and Ben as a Navajo, and it was no less true for the Mashpee trial that James Clifford examined in his essay in a decade in which multiculturalism was consolidated,even as it faced challenges from the right (and the left). Identity promised to solve the unimaginable actual complexity of cultural learning, adaptation, translation, and mixing, a complexity always present in human experience, but whose speed and intensity increased with modern migrations . Momaday turns to race as the grounds for thinking about cultural continuity, describing things obviously learned—learned sometimes quite laboriously—as lying like “memory” in peoples’ “blood.” Like the third-phase Momaday,the first-phase Hurston had also been concerned with theorizing continuity. One theme common to both Hurston’s  Chapter 8 Ishmael Reed and the Search for Survivals The [Bandung] conference called for a renewal of the ancient Asian and African cultures and religions. Privately, Wright considered such resolutions “pathetic exultations of past and dead cultures.” —Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright, 2001 (466) A spectre is haunting america—the spectre of neo-hoodooim. all the powers of old america have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: allen ginsberg timothy leary richard nixon edward teller billy graham time magazine the new york review of books and the underground press. may the best church win. shake hands now and come out conjuring. —Ishmael Reed, “Black Power Poem,” catechism of d neoamerican hoodoo church, 1970 (3) [qtd. in Fontenot 20] REED AND THE SEARCH FOR SURVIVALS 261 ethnography and fiction in the 1930s was her search for cultural survivals , or retentions, across many generations of African Americans and AfroCaribbeans , transversing the violent diaspora of the Middle Passage. How to formulate that kind of cultural continuity without slipping into a racial basis was a key problem with which Boasian anthropology struggled. Inaugural multiculturalist writers in the 1970s and 1980s sometimes turned to this anthropological account to formulate cultural continuity through the model of cultural longevity and endurance, and sometimes the substance of that continuity,as established by a previous generation of anthropologists. Such is the case in Ishmael Reed’s work in the late 1960s and early 1970s culminating in the 1972 Mumbo Jumbo, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s work in the 1980s culminating in her 1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Reed looked back explicitly to Zora Neale Hurston’s 1930s work, and Anzaldúa looked back (less explicitly) to Américo Paredes’s 1950s work. Reed and Anzaldúa were deeply interested in what these two anthropologists (and other ones) had to say about the possibilities for cultural survivals in otherwise modernizing and assimilating populations. What makes them exemplary of the third phase of multiculturalism is their turn against the liberal-consensus sociologically modeled assimilationism, and their turn to anthropology for both the model of minority culture and the substance of what was in that culture. But like Momaday, Reed and Anzaldúa ultimately ground African American and Chicano cultural retentions in race,thus erasing the hard-won conceptual disengagement of culture from race that had been the orthodoxy for Hurston and Paredes. Walter Benn Michaels, however, has argued that the earlier search for retentions undertaken by Hurston and Herskovits was no less racial than the kind of survivals hypothesized by Reed and Anzaldúa. Herskovits’s exploration of the possibilities of retention was inseparable from race, according to Michaels, “for in his identification of the Negro ‘people’ and, more particularly , in his characterization of African customs as part of that people’s past, Herskovits turns out to lean more heavily on the concept of racial identity than his culturalist rhetoric suggests” (Our America 126). Herskovits, says Michaels, wants to “guarantee an unbroken chain of (cultural) Africanisms and so avoid any appeal” to race, but is ultimately unable to do so: “For the fact that some people before you did some things that you do does not in itself make what they did part of your past. To make what they did part of your past, there must be some prior assumption of identity between you and them...

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