Ishmael Reed and the Idea of Multiculturalism
We may agree that the concept of
multiculturalism is concerned with one of several ways we have chosen to talk
about how human beings live together.
The most basic meaning of “multiculturalism” refers to conditions of
existence in a defined space (nation or territory) that is inhabited by people
who have, and identify with, different cultural assumptions, beliefs and
practices. Our literary discussions of
multiculturalism often borrow ideas from the discipline of anthropology, just
as our literary theories borrow freely from the domain of philosophy. If we
have been trained to study literature rather than the subject matter of various
social sciences, we need to be cautious.
For American scholars, good critical thinking demands that we first
examine de facto (actual, operative)
conditions of the multicultural in tandem with de jure (abstract, legal) conditions. For all scholars, I believe
it is prudent to identify the multicultural behaviors that obtain in our own
countries before we produce ideas about the multicultural in “cross-cultural
contexts.” We need to know the nature of local borders (both in the geographical
and metaphorical sense) prior to embracing transcendent global perspectives.
The wording “cross-cultural”
implies, for me at least, that the foreignness of culture A has been distinguished from the foreignness or
strangeness of culture B. If we are not in possession of such
distinctions, we fail to notice that we can be foreign (strange, dissimilar, marginal)
in our “home” cultures. Recognition of
that possibility is crucial.
We can easily fall into the trap of
believing that our culture and its artifacts are superior to the culture and
artifacts of the “other,” especially when “we” and “the other” share the same
citizenship. Recognition of a problem that is at once cross-cultural and
multicultural led to the publication in 1990 of Redefining American Literary History by the prestigious Modern
Language Association. Those of us who produced that book found a theoretical
model in the groundbreaking work of Ishmael Reed, even if we did not say as
much at that time. I hasten to note that “theory,” as the word applies to Reed,
does not refer to the kind of work done by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, or Jacques
Derrida. It refers to the explanatory
suppositions Reed as a non-academic writer uses in telling us what is
multicultural and why we should absorb the idea of multiculturalism in our
everyday lives. Our work was based on that kind of theory. We did say that our redefining project
eschewed “traditional, patriarchal thought about culture and literature” and
sought “instead explanatory models that account for the multiple voices and
experiences that constitute the literature and literary history of the United
States”(4).
Failure to minimize disciplinary prejudices
tends to defeat our objective of acquiring new knowledge. It would be a mistake, for example, to ignore
the hidden dimensions of differences that have obtained historically in the
evolving of American literature before making a dash to find the significant
differences among a range of literatures written in some variety of English, in
some variety of other languages. In the
case of American literature, we can gain insights about multiculturalism as a
combative process from a brief review of what Ishmael Reed has been working at
for almost half a century.
Among contemporary American
writers, Ishmael Reed is the major “informal” or “non-academic” theorist and
“pragmatic” proponent of late 20th –century and early 21st-century
“literary” multiculturalism in the United States of America. Since the early nineteenth century, America
has embraced political myths of “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and
justice for all” to minimize
recognition of its multiethnic and multicultural identity. Reed has effectively challenged the validity
of those myths by action that goes beyond “deconstructing.” He has consistently “constructed,” by way of
his provocative essays, anthologies, and fiction, a rationale to maximize acknowledgement of the
interactive presence of multiculturalism in the literary and social evolution
of America.
My comments quite briefly address
what might be designated Reed’s “combative conversation” with his nation. Reed’s anthologies ---- 19 Necromancers From Now: An Anthology of Original American Writing For
the 1970s (1970), Calafia: The
California Poetry (1979), MultiAmerica:
Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace (1997), From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the
Americas, 1900-2002 (2003), and Pow
Wow: Charting the Fault Lines in the American Experience –Short Fiction from
Then to Now (2009) -----provide subject matter as well as evidence for
open-ended debate regarding theory and praxis of “literary” multiculturalism in American
and global contexts. Reed’s
introductions contain the theory; the works he selected for each anthology
illustrate the praxis.
Reed opens a recent collection of
writing, Going Too Far: Essays about
America’s Nervous Breakdown, with
two sentences that fundamentally establish his place in the history of black
writing since the 1960s:
When they tell me “don’t go there” that’s my signal to navigate the
forbidden topics of American life. Just
as the ex-slaves were able to challenge the prevailing attitudes about race in
the United States after arriving in Canada, I am able to argue from Quebec
against ordained opinion that paints the United States as a place where the old
sins of racism have been vanquished and that those who insist that much work
remains to be done are involved in “Old Fights,” as one of my young critics,
John McWhorter, claims in articles in Commentary
and The New Republic, where I am
dismissed as an out of touch “fading anachronism.” (11)
Reed is not an anachronism. He is a writer who provokes us into seeing
what multiculturalism might be in the United States and why it is so often
attacked
Reed’s evolving theory began with
his assaults on restrictive monoculturalism associated with the Black Arts
Movement of the 1960s. In his December 1969 introduction for 19 Necromancers From Now, Reed
proclaimed
Perhaps at the roots of American art is a rivalry between the oppressor
and the oppressed, with a secret understanding that the oppressor shall always
prevail and make off with the prizes, no matter how inferior his art to that of
his victims. Art in America may even be
related to sexual competition. In the
beginning was The Word and The Word is the domain of White patriarchy. Beware.
Women and natives are not to tamper with The Word. (xix)
After much autobiographical
testimony about America, Reed admitted that he “omitted White writers.” Having
examined “the many exclusionary American anthologies that flood the market, I
somehow feel that they will get by” (xxiii). With a slip of contradiction, he
wrote “Indian People, Black People, White People, Chinese People, and Blue
People unravel their experiences through its [the anthology’s] pages” (xxiv). At this stage of theory-making, Reed was
himself exclusionary.
He was feeling his way into
multiculturalism. By January 22, 1978,
the date of his preface to Calafia: The
California Poetry, he had arrived at a more mature idea of multiculturalism
and how to represent it. He provides a
quite “breezy” historical account of California as “the home of the
multi-cultures,” the physically and linguistically different indigenous
peoples, the Spanish, the Mexicans, the blacks and, since the 1840s, Asian
immigrants. To reflect all this mixing, tense state of difference, and cross-fertilization
in poetry, Reed brought “together the poetry of different California cultures
under one roof” without segregating “those cultures according to ‘race,’
‘nation,’ or chronology. The erasing of categories makes it appear that poetry,
in the words of Simon Ortiz, is “an all-inclusive singular event and idea
throughout time” (xlii). I suspect
Ishmael Reed was imitating the nineteenth-century practice of authenticating
slave narratives with letters and testimonials.
Thus, Calafia has “authenticating”
introductions by Bob Callahan, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Simon Ortiz, Shawn Hsu
Wong, Wakako Yamauchi, and Al Young.
Their words give multiethnic credibility to the multicultural
enterprise.
Reed’s speculations about
multiculturalism take an instructive turn in his introduction to MultiAmerica. He was dealing in this
anthology with the essay, a genre that contrasts with either poetry or fiction.
For Reed, collecting essays facilitated a turn from multicultural expression as
“proofs” to multicultural expression as an array of “weapons” to deploy in
battle with American mass media’s efforts to promote monocultural thought, even
as it gave lukewarm recognition to cultural diversity or cultural difference.
Reed was fighting the persistence of the binary (the black and white
characterization of American society) and highlighting essays by writers of
many ethnicities to put “race” in its place and offer the American public
alternative articulations, newer diverging and converging perspectives on the
drama of being American. Reed recognized multiculturalism is “safe” between the
covers of a book but often dangerous and threatening outside the book. That is
to say, literary representation does not force us to deal with the palpable
elements of the multicultural. The
anthology was to some degree, Reed assured us, “an intellectual anti-trust
action against the tyranny that communications oligopolies hold over public
discussion”, an action conducted by writers “concerned about the future of the
United State in which one ‘race’ or ethnic group is no longer dominant and
where the pressures to assimilate are not as demanding as they were in a former
time “(xxvii). Such multicultural battle still continues. It sponsors optimism
and pessimism, or the branching of multicultural speculations that we find in
Reed’s introductions for From Totems to
Hip-Hop and Pow Wow.
The introductions to these recent
multicultural experiments are less combative in tone, less devoted to
speculation than to application. Their nuances call for very close reading. The
shift is a warning about limits, about how radical discourses may get
transformed over time into persuasive gestures and lose a bit of strident
provocation. From Totems to Hip Hop is constructed as a textbook of multicultural poetry.
Reed gives much more attention in this anthology to consequences of teaching
multicultural literature and to the status of universal themes in his October
23, 2002 introduction. At the core of
his Cinco de Mayo 2008 introduction
to Pow Wow is a concession germane to
thinking about cross-cultural contexts, because Reed asserts that
Deprived of or excluded from the normal channels of communication by
media increasingly monopolized by a few companies, people from diverse
background and from different time periods may have no other means but writing
to engage in a cross-cultural or a cross-time dialogue with one another. No other means to comment on the important
issues both historical and current: war, slavery, race, anti-Semitism, gender,
class, dysfunctional family life, and the like (xi).
A few pages later, he reiterates:
Excluded from media power, American Indian, Hispanic, Asian American,
and African American writers often use fiction to tell their side of the
American story and to explore the fault lines that separate groups from one
another. In the media it is left to outsiders to define members of ethnic
groups, often with disastrous results like Birth
of a Nation and the television series The
Wire (xiii).
I sense that Reed has given us an
important lesson about power in his introductions, that he warns us to exercise
caution in how we go about engaging “multiculturalism” as conditions of
existence in a defined space (nation or territory) that is inhabited by people
who have, and identify with, different cultural assumptions, beliefs and
practices. Scholars are neither exactly
“outside” that space nor immune to its unpredictable conditions.
WORKS CITED
Reed, Ishmael, ed. Calafia:
The California Poetry. Berkeley, CA: Y’Bird Books, 1979. Print.
____________. From
Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas,
1900-2002. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003. Print.
___________., Going
Too Far: Essays about America’s Nervous Breakdown
Montreal: Baraka Books 2012. Print.
___________. MultiAmerica: Essays on Cultural Wars and
Cultural Peace. New York: Viking Penguin, 1997. Print.
___________. 19
Necromancers From Now: An Anthology of Original American Writing For the 1970s.
Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1970. Print.
___________, ed. with Carla Blank. Pow Wow: Charting the Fault
Lines in the American Experience ---Short Fiction from Then to Now.
Philadelphia: DaCapo Press, 2009. Print.
Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. Redefining American Literary History. New
York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Print.
