The Trickster in Ishmael Reed’s Dualistic Representations of Black Radicalism and Nationalism in Mumbo Jumbo

Introduction

Ishmael Reed’s classic novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) both celebrates and vituperates black radicalism and nationalism, suggesting the author’s ambivalent views about liberation movements. Yet, despite this duality, Reed’s novel is consistent since it definitely promotes multiculturalism over the blind adoration of singular traditions or experiences, allowing us to establish a theoretical framework to explain how both the trickster figure and the subversive black Atlantic formation he calls “Jes Grew” advocate difference and equal, plural meaning, preventing a totalized truth. Within this theoretical framework, nationalism and radicalism become deceptive ideologies or strategies that can lose their power to bring equality and socioeconomic change when they lean toward hucksterism, fascism, or monolithic ideologies with enormous repression and exclusions. Therefore, the trickster becomes the avatar of a multiculturalism, which is a third space, separate and distinct from both white supremacy and black radicalism, which can be used to resist the essentialisms and exploitations that capitalism engenders in African American society.

Even if it was written in 1970, Mumbo Jumbo revisits the 1920s, when various forms of black radicalisms developed in the United States in an attempt to bring social and economic justice to African Americans and to promote Pan-African cultural and political consciousness among them. Employing the trickster’s resistance strategies, Reed depicts fictional and actual black nationalists of the 1920s in terms that both ridicule and revere them, showing a mixture of the playfulness and seriousness that characterize his novel. This multidimensional and unrestrained quality of Mumbo Jumbo derives from Reed’s status as a trickster author who pokes fun at black radicalism and nationalism while recognizing their measurable importance in resistances against racial supremacy and exploitation against blacks in the United States. Reed’s trickster status is also noticeable in the frenetic style, buoyant language, and sly attitudes of his novel’s characters, suggesting that radicalism and nationalism can become deceptive ideologies that lean toward hucksterism when the historical figures that spearhead them succumb to the temptations of capitalism, self-aggrandizement, and racial and cultural fundamentalisms.

Two historical figures whose movements were compromised by such forces, despite their legitimate struggles for equality and justice, were Abdul Hamid and Marcus Garvey. In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed represents these leaders in terms that convey his dualistic attitudes toward black radicalism and nationalism. On the one hand, Reed is fascinated by the determined ways in which both figures rose to prominence in New York City during the 1920s, thanks to their struggles against the racism and socioeconomic dominations that prevented African Americans from achieving equality. Reed praises the trickster tactics that both leaders employed to establish their movements and defend blacks. On the other hand, he pokes fun at the absolutist and essentialist nationalism, radicalism, and narcissism that jeopardized both Hamid and Garvey’s movements by transforming the leaders into victims of their own hucksterism. Yet the biggest tricksters were capitalism and racism, since they created the resentment and prejudices that many white Americans and a few black leaders expressed toward Garvey and Hamid in the 1920s, ushering in the two revolutionaries’ downfalls.

Defining Black Radicalism

Black radicalism refers to the subversive, unyielding, subaltern, and selfless ways in which various black communities from around the world resist oppression by representing themselves as people who have been dispossessed, objectified, and demonized through bondage, imperialism, colonialism, and other forces of Western capitalism. Theorizing “Black radicalism” as a complex African “dialectical negation of Western civilization,” Cedric J. Robinson observes: “It is a specifically African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation woven into the interstices of European social life from the inception of Western civilization.”¹ A crucial part of black radicalism is black nationalism, namely, the solidarity that black populations, whose ancestors were both enslaved and colonized by Europeans, have developed to resist such tyranny. Tommie Shelby explains: “Black nationalists advocate such things as black self-determination, racial solidarity and group self-reliance, various forms of voluntary racial separation, pride in...