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Available
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Description
Ishmael Reed's inspired fable of the ragtime era, in which a social movement threatens to suppress the spread of black culture--hailed by Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canon In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the "Jes Grew" epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they'll bump and grind into a frenzy. Working to combat the Jes Grew infection are the puritanical Atonists, a group bent on cultivating a "Talking Android," an African American who will infiltrate the unruly black communities and help crush the outbreak. But PaPa LaBas, a houngan voodoo priest, is determined to keep his ancient culture--including a key spiritual text--alive. Spanning a dizzying host of genres, from cinema to academia to mythology, Mumbo Jumbo is a lively ride through a key decade of American history. In addition to ragtime, blues, and jazz, Reed's allegory draws on the Harlem Renaissance, the Back to Africa movement, and America's occupation of Haiti. His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Ishmael Reed including rare images of the author.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Mdshrk1
Multimedia book, before there really was multimedia. Jus Grew has infected America and the Knights Templar and the Wallflower Order are out to stop it. Papa LaBas and his VooDoo cronies are out to stop them. The movement is just what it says it is, and came into creation the same way: it "Jus'
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Grew." This is a mystical book that describes Reed's attitudes about race, incorporates legends from Europe and Africa, and is a murder/conspiracy novel at the same time. Show Less
LibraryThing member Porius
cool papa bell was so fast that he'd hit the light switch and before the room went dark he'd be all wrapped up in the covers. i saw ishmael reed at the downtown library in detroit, and he was just as quick.
LibraryThing member whitewavedarling
Something like a version of Black Like Me, but written by Pynchon----this one just wasn't my cup of tea. The pace was lightning fast, but it never slowed down or went in depth enough for me to really catch hold of any but the most basic ideas within the plot. It was an interesting experiment in
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conception and reading, but after the experiment wore off on me in the first hundred or so pages, there just wasn't anything there to keep me going. Cinematic--experimental--interesting--creative.......but not, in the end, anything I'd want to come back to. For me, the points could have been made with less somersaulting in the text and structure. Show Less
LibraryThing member mjpronko
Wildly rambling and hilarious take on American culture. Reed pits the straight, can't dance world against the hip, love music world, and the latter comes out on top. This is an important work that probably would never be written outside of the 1960s mindset where music is the moving force of the
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better half of humanity, while the other half tries to keep everyone from moving to the groove. It's an extended meditation on American culture's odd relationship to black music, and the power of that music. Show Less
LibraryThing member paradoxosalpha
THE Neo-Hoodoo conspiracy yarn. Imagine if Dan Brown were a poet into jazz music and trance evocation. More necessary than ever.
LibraryThing member ostrom
I love this book, its dizzying improvisations, its satire and wit. It's an easy book to love but a difficult one, alas, to teach.
LibraryThing member booksofcolor
Beyond intriguing to mind-bending, in a very good way, were Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed and Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster. Both novels are highly stylized and require a lot of attention, but were, I thought, well worth it. I'm still thinking about both of them.
LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater
Didn't finish. Wanted to love it, because it's clearly important to a particular moment in literature (which is still thoroughly relevant in 2018) and it's wonderfully, wildly postmodern, but it sacrifices too much in its pursuit of that for me to love it. Would love to revisit once I'm less
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time-poor, and can maybe enjoy it as part of a group read-a-long or with some recreational drugs. Show Less
LibraryThing member JazzBookJournal
There are reports that a strange contagion is sweeping the country, playing hide and seek with the authorities, jumping from one neighborhood to another. Some people think it’s a hoax; others are convinced it is a conspiracy to destroy Western civilization. In Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed reimagined
Reed drops some clues early as to what he’s getting at. The outbreak (after a fleeting episode in the 1890s) erupts in Congo Square in 1920—not coincidentally the year Charlie Parker was born. Infections spread from New Orleans to Chicago then threaten New York. Mumbo Jumbo. The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance ain’t what they seem.
The new plague is a kind of anti-plague, really, one that enlivens rather than kills its host, causing an outbreak of dancing and sensuousness, people wriggling like fish, ‘lusting after relevance,’ ebullient and ecstatic.
Even the sap in the maple trees moves nasty.
In Reed’s multifaceted presentation, black music & dance, poetry & painting—favoring spontaneity, creativity and free expression over the strictures that would shackle the human spirit—were a challenge to the aesthetic order, and a threat to Western civilization more generally. The battle between opposing aesthetics was an early-20th c. American manifestation of an ancient conflict with origins in Egypt (Sun Ra was right!), renewed in late antiquity when the Church drove the rites associated with the pagan gods underground, where they persisted. The only remedy that the Church and the forces of order thenceforward knew was to ‘beat the living shit out of them.’ The 1915 invasion of Haiti by US Marines was intended as a preemptive strike against a Vodoun invasion, and Warren Harding was pushed into the presidency by agents of a secret society determined to thwart the spread of the ass-shaking epidemic. The plan goes off the rails when Harding exposes the Holy War in Haiti and then is spotted at a rent party in Harlem, with music and dancing as cover for a ‘chitterling switch’ to raise money for an anti-lynching campaign. Harding is suspected of speaking in code to blacks (“The Negro should be the Negro and not an imitation White man”) and of hiding his Negro ancestry and thus must be eliminated as Garfield was. Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey and Black Herman are subverting the intentions of the New Negro to assume his place in the established order; the last remnants of the Knights Templar are in hot pursuit of a band of mu’tafikah that is looting museums (‘pirate dens’) in a campaign to return stolen art to its origins; and the ancient rites have resurfaced as samizdat. At their wits’ end, the agents of order are forced to fight fire with fire—publishing a literary magazine as an organ of disinformation, and concocting a plot to impoverish the country so that people cannot afford radios.
A houngan explains that outbreaks of the dancing plague occurred because the mysteries had no text to turn to. A lost liturgy was seeking its litany. The genius of black people in America, says the houngan, is that they were dumped here on their own without the Book to tell them where the spirits were or how to perform the rites to invoke them and so they made up their own. Blues. Ragtime. Jazz. Inadvertently, they preserved and advanced the Work. With Mumbo Jumbo, the Work once more finds its Word.
Remember to feed the loas.
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the past (all the way back) and predicted the future.Reed drops some clues early as to what he’s getting at. The outbreak (after a fleeting episode in the 1890s) erupts in Congo Square in 1920—not coincidentally the year Charlie Parker was born. Infections spread from New Orleans to Chicago then threaten New York. Mumbo Jumbo. The Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance ain’t what they seem.
The new plague is a kind of anti-plague, really, one that enlivens rather than kills its host, causing an outbreak of dancing and sensuousness, people wriggling like fish, ‘lusting after relevance,’ ebullient and ecstatic.
Even the sap in the maple trees moves nasty.
In Reed’s multifaceted presentation, black music & dance, poetry & painting—favoring spontaneity, creativity and free expression over the strictures that would shackle the human spirit—were a challenge to the aesthetic order, and a threat to Western civilization more generally. The battle between opposing aesthetics was an early-20th c. American manifestation of an ancient conflict with origins in Egypt (Sun Ra was right!), renewed in late antiquity when the Church drove the rites associated with the pagan gods underground, where they persisted. The only remedy that the Church and the forces of order thenceforward knew was to ‘beat the living shit out of them.’ The 1915 invasion of Haiti by US Marines was intended as a preemptive strike against a Vodoun invasion, and Warren Harding was pushed into the presidency by agents of a secret society determined to thwart the spread of the ass-shaking epidemic. The plan goes off the rails when Harding exposes the Holy War in Haiti and then is spotted at a rent party in Harlem, with music and dancing as cover for a ‘chitterling switch’ to raise money for an anti-lynching campaign. Harding is suspected of speaking in code to blacks (“The Negro should be the Negro and not an imitation White man”) and of hiding his Negro ancestry and thus must be eliminated as Garfield was. Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey and Black Herman are subverting the intentions of the New Negro to assume his place in the established order; the last remnants of the Knights Templar are in hot pursuit of a band of mu’tafikah that is looting museums (‘pirate dens’) in a campaign to return stolen art to its origins; and the ancient rites have resurfaced as samizdat. At their wits’ end, the agents of order are forced to fight fire with fire—publishing a literary magazine as an organ of disinformation, and concocting a plot to impoverish the country so that people cannot afford radios.
A houngan explains that outbreaks of the dancing plague occurred because the mysteries had no text to turn to. A lost liturgy was seeking its litany. The genius of black people in America, says the houngan, is that they were dumped here on their own without the Book to tell them where the spirits were or how to perform the rites to invoke them and so they made up their own. Blues. Ragtime. Jazz. Inadvertently, they preserved and advanced the Work. With Mumbo Jumbo, the Work once more finds its Word.
Remember to feed the loas.
Show Less
Publication
Scribner (1996), Edition: Illustrated, 224 pages
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Fiction — 1973)
The Great American Novels (1972)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1972-08-16
Physical description
8 inches
ISBN
0684824779 / 9780684824772