[Continued from David Mikics, "Postmodernism, Ethnicity and Underground Revisionism in Ishmael Reed" _Postmodern Culture_ v.1 n.3 (May, 1991).] NOTES ^1^ Since the 1960s, the academy and the world of publishing have tended to favor those African-American writers who seem most overtly to invoke the communal inheritance of traditional African-American values. Writers like Andrea Lee who exhibit skepticism about the survival of tradition in a postmodern world are stigmatized by the critical establishment. ^2^ See, among many other sources, Hal Foster, ed., _The Anti-Aesthetic_ (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983); Seyla Benhabib, "A Reply to Jean-Francois Lyotard," in Linda Nicholson, ed., _Feminism/Postmodernism_ (New York: Routledge, 1990); Jurgen Habermas, _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_ (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990); Andreas Huyssen, _After the Great Divide_ (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986); Fredric Jameson, _Postmodernism_ (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991). Huyssen's delineation of the limitations in Habermas' championing of aesthetic modernity against postmodernity has influenced my own case for the critical capacity of postmodernism. ^3^ It is important to note, of course, that Habermas also emphasizes the gains in human freedom that have stemmed from the Weberian rationalization processes that enable the state to survive. ^4^ See Habermas' Adorno prize lecture, translated as "Modernity: An Incomplete Project," in Foster, ed., 3-15, and _The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_. ^5^ As Paul Smith, Rainer Nagele, and others have pointed out: see Paul Smith, _Discerning the Subject_ (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1988), 163-64, and Rainer Nagele, "Freud, Habermas and the Dialectic of Enlightenment," _New German Critique_ 22 (Winter 1981), 41-62. ^6^ _Mumbo Jumbo_ (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 211. Thus _Mumbo Jumbo_'s tongue-in-cheek genealogy of Jes Grew--whose contagious character means that it can never really be pinned down as lineage or inheritance--stretches from Isis and Osiris, to Dionysus, to Jethro, to vodoun. ^7^ On this point, see David Kaufmann, "The Profession of Theory," _PMLA_ May 1990, 519 -30. ^8^ On this issue of what DuBois called "double consciousness," see Robert Stepto's landmark _From Behind the Veil_ (Champaign-Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1979). ^9^ On this point I have benefitted from Lawrence Hogue's work in progress on African-American postmodernism, as well as a talk given by David Bradley at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), 1989. ^10^ Here as elsewhere in this essay, I am indebted to Hal Foster's analysis of the subcultural as a viable force in postmodernism: see "Readings in Cultural Resistance" in _Recodings_ (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1985). ^11^ This is Charles Altieri's description of Paul Smith's position in Altieri's _Canons and Consequences_ (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1990), 206. Altieri criticizes Smith for imagining a too easy transition from such practices of resistance to statements of political position, thus giving short shrift to those resistant modes, like Derrida's and the later Barthes', which do not add up to avowals of political responsibility. While agreeing fully with Altieri's brilliant and subtle critique of Smith, I also have major misgivings concerning Altieri's finding of deficiencies in Derrida's and Barthes's notions of responsiveness. For Altieri, the private, self-ironizing nature of Derrida's later style needs to be compensated for by a publicly responsible or official subject, who will stabilize (or perhaps repress?) what is risky about such intimate ironies (see _Canons_, 209; see also Altieri's essay on _Ecce Homo_ in Daniel O'Hara, ed., _Why Nietzsche Now?_ [Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1985], 410-11). I think that the model of compensation/stabilization, along with the zero-sum picture of bargaining, negotiation and consensus that tends to accompany Altieri's official self, adds up to a dangerously limited way of conceiving the political. The invocation of the normative force of reasonable choice as a necessary supplement to aesthetics and private life is directly relevant to the antagonistic criticism of Reed. Instead of trying to make our private aesthetic obsessions publicly responsible by worrying that theorists like Nietzsche and Derrida, or writers like Reed, are not sufficiently interested in justifying liberal political judgment, I believe we ought to acknowledge--rather than look for ways of repressing--the gap between personal aesthetics and public responsibility, the unavoidable fact that defines (post)modern politics. Needless to say, my qualm here applies to Habermas, as well as Smith and Altieri. ^12^ Frank Lentricchia, "_Libra_ as Postmodern Critique," _South Atlantic Quarterly_, 89 (1990), 431-53. (Essay originally published in _Raritan_, Spring 1989.) The passage cited is on 443. ^13^ Lionel Trilling, "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture," in _Beyond Culture_ (New York: Viking, 1965). Freud, of course, was in fact Jewish, whereas the other "other cultures" cited in Trilling's great essay were located purely in Freud's imagination, not his biographical context. But, following a strategy which critical postmodernists might find appealing, Trilling tends to downplay this distinction: the adversarial use of the subculture/other culture takes precedence over the question of its literal historical presence. ^14^ I am indebted to Michael Jarrett for the analogy between Reed and sampling. ^15^ Lentricchia has noted the total absence of his own ethnicity from DeLillo's work (in "The American Writer as Bad Citizen--Introducing Don DeLillo," _SAQ_ 1990 [89, 2], 239-44); and Pynchon's prestigious New England ancestry is played as an elaborate self-exploding joke in _Gravity's Rainbow_. There is, of course, an analogy between Pynchon's "preterite" and Reed's "neohoodooism," but Reed claims a concrete cultural context (even if a slippery and self- displacing one) for his aesthetic slogan as Pynchon does not. It should be understood that I am not arguing that contemporary writers "ought" to use subcultural tradition in Reed's manner, nor that Reed is a better writer than Pynchon or DeLillo for their failure to do so. ^16^ See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey," and James A. Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture," in Gates, ed., _Black Literature and Literary Theory_ (New York: Methuen, 1984). ^17^ The Talking Heads' _Speaking in Tongues_ (New York: Sire, 1983), whose title humorously endows commodified pop with a quasi-religious aura borrowed from alien traditions, draws on Nigerian Juju music; their later record _Naked_ (New York: Sire, 1988) is similarly indebted to Zairian soukous. For a very useful treatment of the analogy between modern art and "primitive" art as an attempt to construct "universalism," see James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," in his _The Predicament of Culture_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988). ^18^ For a treatment of this issue of appropriation in the context of the Cuban Afro-Cubanismo movement, see Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarria, _Alejo Carpentier, The Pilgrim at Home_ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977). ^19^ Reed's status as an African-American writer who claims Africa-derived folk culture for his own just as Yeats claims Celtic folklore should prevent us from simply identifying his authorial ideology in respect to Africa with that of Picasso, Stravinsky et. al.; one might choose the claiming of African folk culture in Aime Cesaire, Jay Wright, Edward Brathwaite, Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott for an extremely various set of comparisons to Reed. ^20^ I am here arguing against the easy conflation of ethnicity, political opposition, and postmodernism in Linda Hutcheon, _A Poetics of Postmodernism_ (New York: Routledge, 1988), 60-70. Hutcheon programmatically ignores the conflicts among modernist, postmodernist, and nostalgic or premodern desires in texts such as Morrison's _Tar Baby_ in order to claim a (false) harmony between postmodernism and African-American self-assertion. ^21^ Lee Breuer's dreadful _Warrior Ant_ comes to my mind here, but any reader will be able to supply his/her favorite examples. ^22 Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ (New York: Viking, 1973). ^23^ Maya Deren, _Divine Horsemen_ (New Paltz, NY: Book Collectors Society, 1970 [1st ed. 1953]), 134. ^24 James A. Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture," in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., _Black Literature and Literary Theory_, 72. See also 67: "In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is 'there for you to pick up when you come back to get it.' If there is a goal . . . it continually 'cuts' back to the start, in the musical meaning of 'cut' as an abrupt, seemingly unmotivated break. . . ." For a very helpful analysis of the technique of "cutting" in African music, see J.M. Chernoff, _African Rhythm and African Sensibility_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979). ^25^ See Kimberly Benston, _Baraka: the Renegade and the Mask_ (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1976). ^26^ See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Signifying Monkey," in _Black Literature and Literary Theory_, 297. ^27^ Houston Baker, _Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987), 56; see 69. ^28^ See Cornel West, "Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation," in _Yale Journal of Criticism_ 1 (1987), 199. West's essay is a very important and persuasive statement, though I disagree locally with his view of Reed. ^29^ A comparison might also be drawn between Reed and Don DeLillo, whose recent _Libra_ advances a conspiracy theory of the JFK assassination not unlike the conspiracies so doggedly pursued in Pynchon's and Reed's novels, though DeLillo's tone of dire, hard-boiled historicity differs from theirs. For remarks on Reed and Pynchon, see Reginald Martin, _Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics_ (New York: St. Martin's P, 1983), 2; see also 43. ^30^ This point is argued by Fredric Jameson in an interview in _Social Text_ 17 (1987), 45, in which Jameson contrasts the passivity of the postmodern individual subject to the "collective subject" present in "third world literature." This "collective subject" is an interpretive construct similar to Baker's "common sense of the tribe," the communal emphasis of much African-American literature. See the related (and problematic) article by Jameson, "Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism," in _Social Text_ 15 (1986), and the response by Aijaz Ahmad, "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness," _Social Text_ 17 (1987). ^31^ For two opposed points of view on this issue in Pynchon (whether his notion of the subversive is sinister and hopeless or liberating), see, respectively, the essays by George Levine and Tony Tanner in Levine and David Leverenz, eds., _Mindful Pleasures_ (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). ^32^ _The Crying of Lot 49_ (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 170-71. (The passage is cited by Tony Tanner in Harold Bloom, ed., _Thomas Pynchon_ (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 188; see Tanner's commentary on 187.) The third alternative that Oedipa considers--that "a labyrinthine plot has been mounted against" her--exposes the negative potential of the secrecy whose positive side is the liberating "density of dream." Among the many remarkable features of this passage one might notice Pynchon's punning connection, in lamenting "exitlessness," between American failure and the sense of constriction, on the one hand, and American success and wide open spaces, on the other (cf. Latin exitus and Spanish exito)--a frontier ideology also dear to Reed (see, among other texts, his introduction to his anthology of California poetry, _Calafia_ [Berkeley, CA: Y'Bird, 1979]). The dominant image conjured by Pynchon's "exitlessness" is that of a Southern California freeway like those driven so often by Oedipa, but without exits: the frontier as labyrinth or imprisoning web. ^33^ The possibility of subversively liberating moments does, as Levine insists, exist in Pynchon, but these are only moments, not full-scale traditions or communities. The radical or revolutionary movements in the book, even when grounded in community, are just as macabrely threatening as the establishment they combat (for example, the mass- suicidal Hereros of _Gravity's Rainbow_ [315ff.]). ^34^ For a useful survey of Reed's adversarial relation to various "black aesthetic" critics, chiefly Addison Gayle, Houston Baker, and Amiri Baraka, see Martin's book. Reed asserts that he writes within an African-American aesthetic, but he identifies such an aesthetic with a stylistic and structural approach (similar to the concept of "cutting" described by Snead), rather than with revolutionary content, as does Baraka. See Martin, 2; see also Reed's important introductions to the anthologies _Yardbird Lives_ (New York, 1978) and _19 Necromancers from Now_, as well as his famous run-in with the socialist realist Bo Shmo in _Yellow Back Radio_, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969) 34-35. A simplified critique of Reed's polemic in this passage is presented by Michael Fabre, "Postmodernist Rhetoric in Ishmael Reed's _Yellow Back Radio Broke Down_," in P. Bruck and W. Karrer, eds., _The Afro-American Novel Since 1960_ (Amsterdam: Gruner, 1982), 177, who sees it as championing "art" against "commitment." ^35^ Page citations to _The Terrible Twos_ are from the Atheneum edition (New York: Atheneum, 1982). ^36^ Despite the multiplicity of the cultures that the Mutafikah want to liberate, their faith is in the singularity of each of these cultures, and in their own singularity as quarrelsome representatives of these cultures. A Mexican tells an Anglo revolutionary during a Mutafikah meeting that he suspects him because "you carry [Cortes and Pizarro] in your veins as I carry the blood of Moctezuma"; a Chinese attacks a black member by claiming that "you North American blacks were"--and are--"docile"-- because "the strong [Africans] were left behind in South America." (_Mumbo Jumbo_, 86-87.) ^37^ For recent remarks along these lines, see Valerie Smith, _Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987), 102. ^38^ In his Preface to the 1975 anthology _Yardbird Lives_ (ed. with Al Young; New York: Grove, 1978?), Reed attacks the critics who "in 1970" (just before the publication of the volume edited by Addison Gayle, _The Black Aesthetic_) "were united in their attempt to circumscribe the subject and form of Afro-American writing." He goes on to announce that what he calls "the ethnic phase of American literature" is now over, "counterculture ethnic, black ethnic, red ethnic, feminist ethnic, academic ethnic, beat ethnic, New York School ethnic, and all of the other churches who believe their choir sings the best." Reed proclaims that "the multicultural renaissance is larger than the previous ones because, like some African and Asian religions, it can absorb them" (_Yardbird Lives_, 13-14). ^39^ _Mumbo Jumbo_, 35. ^40^ See R.F. Thompson, _Flash of the Spirit_ (New York: Random House, 1983), 172-77, Deren, _Divine Horsemen_, and Melville J. Herskovits, _The New World Negro_ (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1966), 324-25, which lists other vodoun syntheses of pagan and Christian. ^41^ _Yellow Back Radio_, 153. ^42^ See Thompson, 179ff. On the ethical ambiguity of vodoun deities and its relation to the twin modes Petro and Rada. On Dom Petro/Petre, see Thompson, 179. It is interesting to note that the Bacchic or Satyrlike sexuality of Reed's Black Peter (revealed as a clever impostor in the sequel, _The Terrible Threes_, 40, 42) can be cross- referenced to the phallic energy frequently associated with the trickster figure in African legend via a pun concealed in his name (the "black snake" of blues tradition). On the "phallic trickster," see Houston Baker, _Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 183ff. Baker remarks that "the trickster is also a cultural gift-bearer" (like Peter/Nicholas!). ^43^ St. Nicholas was noted for rescuing children, usually in groups of three. ^44^ See Charles W. Jones, _St. Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan_ (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978), 43, 61, 307ff. See also 309: Nicholas "thinks in dualities." (Reed evidently relied heavily on Jones' study in writing _The Terrible Twos_.) The duality persists, in diluted form, in the present-day Santa who may give lumps of coal as well as candy. ^45^ For Nicholas' defiance of the Emperor Constantine, see Jones, 34. ^46^ Herskovits, 324. On the marassa as representative of "man's twinned nature," see Deren, 38-41. ^47^ See Deren, 130-37. ^48^ Such skepticism is even more prominent in the sequel to _The Terrible Twos_, 1989's _The Terrible Threes_, which ends with the officially-sponsored kidnapping of the now-leftist Dean Clift.