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Ishmael Reed Flipping the Script

In his book, Mumbo Jumbo , Ishmael Reed puts focus on a different point of view than the common Western view, African Americans. He does this in his book through various ways, including through Jes Grew and his specific examples making fun of the ways Western viewpoints perceive Afro-Americans. Through writing these viewpoints, empathy and a less Western biased history is created that we as readers can see and reflect on in our own world’s history. Mumbo Jumbo also puts into perspective the influence of Haitian culture in New Orleans as the main engineer of what American music has been in the past and what it has come to now.  As we discussed in class, Mumbo Jumbo flips the narrative of racism in the past and empowers Afro-Americans by creating a joke, doing so by mocking white people in the same way black people have been taunted. On pages 96 and 97, the lampoons carved into ivory and wood depict European colonizers in a meta narrative where the Africans become the colonizers ...
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Mother's Younger Brother and His Disguises

Mother’s younger brother’s black face is not just a practical choice when joining Coalhouse's movement, but a metaphor for his fragmented sense of self. Throughout the entire book, he struggles with identity, borrowing literal and figurative masks instead of growing his own authentic and firmly established one. Younger Brother’s reliance on imitations, disguises, and other people’s causes exhibits the fragility of his principles. To see this most clearly, we can look at how he is characterized before he joins Coalhouse’s cause.  Before Coalhouse’s organization, Younger Brother was portrayed as a restless and purposeless person. When Younger Brother had an encounter with Emma Goldman and Evelan Nesbit, he is infatuated and searching with Goldman’s fierce personality, but cannot create or act upon his own convictions (Doctorow, 62-64). After his heartbreak with Nesbit early in the novel, he finds a radical cause, Coalhouse’s, to latch onto (243). I believe his fascination with radica...
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