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Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers /
Redefining
American Literary History
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Books by Ishmael Reed
Yellow Back Radio Broke Down
(1969) /
Mumbo
Jumbo (1972) /
The Last Days of Louisiana Red
(1974) /
Flight to Canada
(1976)
The
Terrible Twos (1982) /
The Terrible
Threes (1999) /
Reckless Eyeballing
(2000)
Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media: The Return of the Nigger
Breakers /
Juice!; A Novel
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Ishmael Reed and
Multiculturalism
By Jerry W. Ward,
Jr.
In
The Gift of
Black Folk (1924), W. E. B. Du Bois asserted that
the meek in the new world “not only inherited the earth
but made their heritage a thing of questing for eternal
youth, of fruitful labor, or joy and music, of the free
spirit and of the ministering hand, of wide and poignant
sympathy with men in their struggle to live and love
which is, after all, the end of being.” Strip Du Bois’s
sentimental prose of flowers and sugar, and one comes to
the core: the descendents of African peoples in the
United States gave this nation the gift of humanity, a
gift that burns the hands of people who have no color.
Those who chirp endlessly about their sympathy for
peoples of color have much to learn from Ishmael Reed.
Since 1969, Reed’s
writing has been an essential tool in my thinking. I
first read
The Free-Lance Pallbearers in Pleiku,
Vietnam and laughed at its humor in that alien Asian
landscape of horror. Almost five decades later, I live
in a vernacular landscape of massive destructive horrors
and still need Reed’s cartography to understand the
multicultural territory. Reed’s words have made me too
wise to laugh.
As an American
thinker and writer, Reed has chosen to provoke
recognitions. This he done with gusto in his novels and
collections of essays and, most importantly, in the
anthologies he has edited. Beginning with
19
Necromancers From Now: An Anthology of Original American
Writing for the 1970s (1970), he included
contributions by Frank Chin and Victor Hernandez Cruz.
His gesture of inclusion was one way of saying to
Afrocentric Americans that excluding people was
tantamount to being white. He explained in a brief
editor’s note: “I have called the authors in this
anthology ‘Black,’ ‘Afro-American,’ ‘Chinese-American,’
or ‘Indian’ because, with the possible exception of one,
this is what they would call themselves if polled.”
Nine years later,
Reed made his case for the plural nature of American
literature by editing
Calafia: The California Poetry,
“the most comprehensive multi-cultural anthology of a
State’s poetry ever compiled.” He strengthened his case
by including authenticating introductions from Bob
Callahan, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Simon Ortiz, Shawn Hsu
Wong, Wakako Yamauchi, and Al Young. Reed operated from
the premise that “if, as they say, California is the
United States’ window on the future, then the prospects
for a diverse national poetry, instead of the various
sects of the moment, are good” (xliii). Using the
conditional mode, Reed floated like a Muhammad Ali
butterfly to avoid jabs from the left and the right.
Redefining
American Literary History (1990), which I co-edited
with A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, was a pure product of the
American academy. It was sponsored by the Committee on
the Literatures and Languages of America of the Modern
Language Association and published by MLA.
Nevertheless, it was influenced indirectly by the
conversation Reed began in founding the Before Columbus
Foundation in 1976. Working from the field rather than
the classroom, Reed was much ahead of the academy in
recognizing the diversity of American literary
tradition. As he insisted in his introduction for
The
Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology (1992):
“Multicultural” is not a description of a category of
American writing—it is a definition of all American
writing (xi). The same declaration appears in the
companion
The Before Columbus Foundation Poetry
Anthology (1992). Both anthologies contain
selections from the American Book Awards 1980-1990, and
both challenge the draconian hegemony of the American
publishing industry. Reed’s sentiments are echoed in J.
J. Phillips’s introduction for the poetry volume:
“Whether or not one likes to acknowledge it, America
always has been a multicultural society, and any
literary canon which presents but a narrow band of the
spectrum of American letters and claim to be
representative is itself a fiction of the first water
“(xv). For reasons that have more to do with power than
with education, America’s public schools and colleges
have yet to renounce the fiction.
Reed has been very
clear-sighted about the limits of his interventions as
they pertain to literature and literacy and about the
necessity of continuing interventions. As Reginald
Martin remarked in Ishmael Reed and the New Black
Aesthetic Critics (1988), Reed is like “the ultimate
Trickster of Hoodoo legend,” who through “his collation
of myth, fact, and apocryphal data into a history”
conducts a quest to formulate “a different, and more
humane, way of experiencing and influencing the world”
(108). In his anthologies, I would argue, Reed places
the burden of proof on fact. To provoke deeper thinking
about the pitfalls of American monoculturalism, Reed
edited
Multi-America: Essays on Cultural Wars and
Cultural Peace (1997), a book that is seminal for
understanding the contested territory of
multiculturalism. Most recently, Reed has edited
From
Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry
Across the Americas (2003) and
Pow Wow: Charting
the Fault Lines in the American Experience—Short Fiction
from Then to Now (2009). It should not be lost on us
that these titles allude to indigenous traditions.
In their chapter
for
The Cambridge History of African American
Literature (2011), Madhu Dubey and Elizabeth Swanson
Goldberg noted that Reed had reservations about the
institutionalization of multiculturalism in the academy
when he underlined “the profitability of racial and
cultural differences to commodity capitalism”(575) in
his novel
Japanese by Spring
(1993). And no
doubt, Reed has reservations about the illusions of
multiculturalism in everyday American life. Reed uses
his intelligence to provoke for the public good; unless
one is a confirmed dunce, one welcomes his provocations
with choice grains of skepticism. Few of us want, I
suspect, to be permanent guests at a tea party in a
Platonic cave. The probity of Reed’s writing and
anthologizing clears the mind of crap. As one of the
contemporary gifts of black folk to our nation,
Ishmael Reed helps us to see a bit of the actual that
“reality” would have us evade.
Dr.
Jerry Ward is a distinguished professor of English and
African American World Studies at Dillard University, New
Orleans, LA. Ward spent 20 years as the Lawrence Durgin
Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College in Jackson. He is
recognized as one of the leading experts on Wright. His
credentials concerning Wright include, co-editor of the Richard
Wright Encyclopedia, to be published in 2006 by Greenwood
Press; founding member of the Richard Wright Circle, and his
recent portrayal of Richard Wright in the Mississippi Humanities
Council's Mississippi Chautauqua Writers series.
Dr. Jerry Ward contributed to the intellectual and cultural
climate in Jackson for many years.
More
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The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers
provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers. It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
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Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''—NYTimes
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The Return of the Nigger Breakers
(Interview) /
Parable of the San
Francisco Negro (2)
The Dark Heathenism of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed
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Barack Obama and the Jim Crow
Media
The Return of the Nigger
Breakers
By
Ishmael Reed
For Ishmael Reed,
Barack Obama, like
Michelangelo’s St.
Anthony, is a
tormented man,
haunted by modern
reincarnations of
the demonic spirits
used to break
slaves. These were
the Nigger Breakers
men like Edward
Covey, who was
handed the job of
breaking Frederick
Douglass. Isn’t it
ironic, writes Reed:
A media that scolded
the Jim Crow South
in the 1960s now
finds itself hosting
the bird. In this
collection, which
includes several
unpublished essays,
Ishmael Reed brings
to bear his grasp of
the
four-centuries-long
African-American
experience as he
turns his
penetrating gaze on
Barack Obama’s
election and first
year in power
establishing himself
as the conscience of
a country that was
once moved by Martin
Luther King’s
dream.—Baraka
Books
(April 15, 2010) |
In the past 40 years, Reed has published more than 20
books and has also made his mark as an editor, publisher, critic,
journalist, songwriter, librettist and fearsome letter-to-the-editor
writer…. Reed is among the most American of American writers, if by
‘American’ we mean a quality defined by its indefinability and its perpetual
transformations as new ideas, influences and traditions enter our cultural
conversation.—The New York Times
With Ishmael Reed, the most persistent myths and
prejudice crumble under powerful unrelenting jabs and razor-sharp insight.—
Le Devoir, Montreal
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Juice!: A Novel
By Ishmael Reed
A new novel from the
most outspoken
African-American
writer of our time.
In 2010, the Newseum
in Washington D.C.
finally obtained the
suit O. J. Simpson
wore in court the
day he was
acquitted, and it
now stands as both
an artifact in their
“Trial of the
Century” exhibit and
a symbol of the
American media’s
endless hunger for
the criminal and the
celebrity. This
event serves as a
launching point for
Ishmael Reed’s
Juice!, a
novelistic
commentary on the
post-Simpson
American media
frenzy from one of
the most
controversial
figures in American
literature today.
Through Paul
Blessings—a censored
cartoonist suffering
from diabetes—and
his cohorts—serving
as stand-ins for the
various mediums of
art—Ishmael Reed
argues that since
1994, “O. J. has
become a metaphor
for things wrong
with culture and
politics.” A lament
for the death of
print media, the
growth of the
corporation, and the
process of growing
old, Juice!
serves as a comi-tragedy,
chronicling the
increased anxieties
of “post-race”
America.—Dalkey
Archive Press
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posted 11 July 2011
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