![]() Best appreciated when accompanied by recreational herbs and/or chemicals. ![]() For those readers unfamiliar with all the references the book is better skimmed for its tone and rhythm since it is difficult to follow. It drops the names and events of the time combining them all with Ancient African myths and traditions to warn African-Americans of the threat to their essence. Mumbo Jumbo is a wild fever dream that spans countries, movements and centuries declaiming the attempts by the Powers That Be to suppress the Real Black Culture of music and dance and transform Blacks to docile slaves of the dominant White Culture. Interesting Period Piece, told in the “Negro” Slang of the 1920’s, notable in the fact that it was written by a MacArthur Genius Grant Recipient, Pulitzer and National Book Award Nominee and Black Activist Poet and Essayist. Interesting for Political & Cultural Influence His style throughout is as avant-garde and vibrant as the music at its center. ![]() 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. 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. But PaPa LaBas, a houngan voodoo priest, is determined to keep his ancient culture - including a key spiritual text - alive. 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. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they'll bump and grind into a frenzy. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the "Jes Grew" epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. In 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. 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 500 greatest books of the Western canon
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