The

The "Dark Heathenism" of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed: African Voodoo As American Literary Hoodoo

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Description

This book posits that Neo-HooDooism, an African Voodoo-derived aesthetic, evinces Ishamel Reed s post-colonial transformation of the English language, colonialist discourses, and imperial cultural systems into discourses of self-empowerment and self-representation. As Reed s return to dark heathenism, Neo-HooDooism represents an attempt to rediscover pre-slavery and pre-colonial African languages and oral traditions to remedy the impact of physical and linguistic displacement that African-Americans continue to experience in the United States. Reed s nine novels are post-colonial writings whose production affects social, cultural, political, and historical contexts from African-American, American multi-ethnic, Caribbean, African, Third-World, and global perspectives. This book analyzes Neo-HooDooism as a post-colonial discourse/literary theory and a multi-cultural poetics through which Reed reconnects the African Diaspora to Africa within a global perspective. To accomplish this, an investigation is made into slavery, hegemony, language, place and displacement, race, gender, feminism, writing, post-coloniality, and theory as post-colonial themes that permeate Reed s nine novels. -- Provided by publisher

Keywords

Reed, Ishmael, 1938- -- Criticism and interpretation; Reed, Ishmael, 1938- -- Aesthetics; Vodou in literature; African Americans in literature; African American aesthetics; Aesthetics, African; Postcolonialism in literature; Cultural pluralism in literature

Document Type

Book

ISBN

9780773454408

Publication Date

2007

Publisher

Edwin Mellen Press

City

Lewiston, NY

Department

Department of Languages and Literatures

Object Description

xvi, 301 p. ; c24 cm

Language

en

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