"To ask again": folklore, Mumbo Jumbo, and the question of ethnographic metafictions.

Ingram, Shelley

Why does Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo, steeped in questions about folklore, anthropological practice, and cultural preservation, receive little attention from scholars who put folklore at the center of their critical analysis? Nineteenth-century folklorist James Russell Lowell once suggested that ballad singers were not truly responsible for the songs that they sang, arguing that part of the "charm" of ballads was that "nobody made them." In Lowell's eyes, the ballads of late nineteenth-century singers seemed "to have come up like violets, and we have only to thank God for them" (qtd. in Bendix 81). This rendering of ballads as organic cultural artifacts, as flowers to be picked by scholars, indicates a type of colonialist thinking that naturalizes racial authenticity. Ishmael Reed's work, with its self-conscious attention to form and metafictional tendencies, does not fit the criteria established by such narrative tropes of organic racial authenticity.

To understand why Reed's work is largely overlooked by folklorists and anthropologists, I examine the intersections of several critical discourses: theories of ethnographic writing, scholarship about the relationship between folklore and literature, and the critical reception of Reed's work. First, I look briefly at the emergence of "new ethnography" in anthropology in the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to trace its impact on the study of folklore and fiction--particularly as this new methodology began to raise questions about the relationship of "fictions" to the project of translating the cultures of Others for a white, Western audience. Many of the debates about new ethnography in turn offer us crucial insight into the ways in which the study of folklore and literature has been, to a large degree, racialized so that novels by minority writers are often approached as "ethnographic fictions": that is, as sites of cultural translation and tourism, where nonwhite writers "translate" their culture so that white readers can learn "what life is really like" for an Other. Even more pointedly, the criticisms of new ethnography are directly related to the absence of Mumbo Jumbo from the scholarship of folklore and fiction. The novel's metafictional self-consciousness embraces many of the narrative techniques that critics of new ethnography feared--techniques that complicate the distinction between reality and fiction, thus making an easy cultural translation through fiction impossible. Finally, I argue that Mumbo Jumbo's absence from the discussion of ethnographic fiction offers an opportunity to begin unpacking the colonialist narratives that often underpin the study of folklore and literature.

Debates about the relationship between traditional ethnography, "new ethnography," and literary fiction began in earnest when anthropologist James Clifford questioned the "transparency of representation and immediacy of experience" in traditional ethnographic writing. In his introduction to the collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Clifford called for an acknowledgment of the fictiveness of seemingly objective works of ethnography, introducing to the discipline of folkloristics the concept of "new ethnography" and spurring scholars to theorize the process of writing ethnography--a task which had not been substantially undertaken before in the field of folklore studies (2). By calling for self-consciousness in ethnography, Clifford and his coeditor George Marcus placed new emphasis on the craft of writing: this move finally required ethnographers to examine the power dynamics involved in, as Robert Emerson argues, "writing" a culture "into being" ("Introduction" 22). Writing Culture therefore had an immediate impact on the study of race in anthropology, as the culture being "written" is so often the culture of an Other. (1) Writing Culture advanced a commitment to move beyond this static inscription of a culture--beginning with recognition of the inherent fictiveness of ethnography. Clifford claims that ethnography is full of "partial truths" and argues that the age of considering anthropology (and folklore) as a pure social science is past, for "science is in, not above, historical and linguistic processes." But more than just questioning the empiricism and objectivity of the "science" of ethnography--an empiricism that had separated anthropology from the humanities--"new ethnography" asked scholars to acknowledge that ethnographies were not straightforward and simple mimetic representations or translations of the lives of Others, or in folklorists' terms, a racialized "folk." (2)

The writing of ethnography is therefore always also a "literary process," and the artfulness of ethnographic writing could no longer be confined to simply a consideration of an author's particular writing style, as was long the case in anthropology and folklore (4). Because the "inscription of ethnographic fictions" is "always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures," the "literariness of anthropology" had to extend to an understanding of the ways in which the entire ethnographic process was influenced by these literary processes: from the choice of subject (the more metaphorical, the better) to the ways the selected observations were "jotted down" to the form and function of the finished ethnographic product (Clifford 2). Clifford's argument, then, also had interesting implications for those folklorists who study literature. When he suggested that ethnography should be considered a fiction, he opened the door for folklorists to reverse the analogy, so "that we may also consider fiction as ethnography" (Visweswaran 16). The study of literature as an ethnographic account of a culture was thus validated by the willingness of new ethnography to see the lines between empirical reality and literary creativity blurred. In a response to Writing Culture, anthropologist Ruth Behar makes the argument that "it is no longer social scientists ... who are shaping U. S. public understanding of culture, race, and ethnicity, but novelists such as Toni Morrison and Amy Tan." She calls for a recognition of writers such as Morrison and Tan as "literary anthropologists," leading to a rush to study their "ethnographic fictions" (20). New ethnography thus allowed anthropologists to shift some of the burden of reflexive and self-conscious representations of Others to literature, since the Other is so often the focus of the anthropologist's and folklorist's gaze.

This new direction of study makes the reluctance of folklorists to engage Mumbo Jumbo as an ethnographic fiction both puzzling and important. Mumbo Jumbo is never mentioned in studies of folklore and literature, even though this novel in particular seems to be an ideal candidate for a folkloristic, ethnographic reading, as Reed's use of elements of Vodou alone make it an attractive text for folklorists) The novel's absence from critical discussions of folklore and literature, I argue, is due in part to two separate reactions to the theories of new ethnography. First, folklorists who study fiction, even while embracing the promises of "partial truths," still too often fall back on colonialist narratives that grant epistemological power to the West. Like Behar, they embrace the "fiction as ethnography" paradigm, but as I argue below, they reject the more radical arguments about the writing of culture offered by new ethnographers, and ultimately, Ishmael Reed. The second reason is bound up in the inevitable backlash against an aesthetic self-consciousness advocated by Clifford and others, a backlash which is in fact also a resistance to the subversions of Western epistemologies that Reed practices in Mumbo Jumbo. That this resistance can be connected to the privileging of social realism found in the Black Arts Movement raises important questions about the role of the study of literature by folklorists in maintaining the cultural dominance of Western cultural practices.

Citing the twinned images of anthropologist Ruth Benedict reading Virginia Woolf's The Waves while writing Patterns of Culture and Woolf reading Patterns of Culture while writing Between the Acts, anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran asks readers take a complex view of the connections between ethnography and literature. She suggests that:

 To argue that ethnography is literature is to remind us of our
 presumptions about literature, to ask again, What is literature? To
 argue that literature is ethnography is to cause reflection about
 the functions of ethnography, to ask again, What is ethnography?
 Clearly, such a juxtaposition provides not a unique but another way
 of posing questions that have been around at least since the
 genesis of the academic disciplines that make them their object.
 (1) 

Ruth Behar attempts to answer some of Visweswaran's suggestions by arguing in her introduction to Women Writing Culture, a feminist response to Writing Culture, that "we [anthropologists] end up, as the poet Marianne Moore would say, planting real people and places in the imaginary gardens of our books" (10). In the twenty years since Writing Culture many anthropologists and folklorists who want to study folklore and literature have accepted, or at least acknowledged, the "ethnography as fiction" paradigm--but the recent trend has been, like Visweswaran, to fill in the analogy Clifford and Marcus implicitly proposed: if ethnography is fiction, then the converse may hold true. Fiction is ethnography--especially since many more people read fiction. The debates surrounding new ethnography, folklore, and literature, then, essentially revolve around one central question, a question that was undoubtedly of interest to Ishmael Reed--how do cultural scholars write about/study/represent the other? Do we seek out better methods of representation, as the proponents of new ethnography suggest, or do we, as folklorist Dorothy Noyes argues, leave this questioning of artistic representation to literature?

Despite the promise of a less binary, more complex relationship between folklore and literature that the study of these ethnographic fictions represents, since these fictions cast doubt over the idea that folklore and literature are inherently opposite, recent explorations of ethnographic fiction have very often been limited to minority writers. (4) Those who study ethnographic fiction posit, perhaps unwittingly, that only ethnic, minority, or regional fiction can be ethnographic. Ethnographic fiction must first come from an insider's perspective, and second, come from "the folk." The argument is that ethnographic fictions are "better representations of culture than standard academic ethnographies" because, free from the rules of ethics and fieldwork, the author may be able to write it as she knows it, not necessarily as she sees it, offering the clarification and translation of culture that ethnography promises (Hill 161). And in our contemporary society, "the rising appreciation of authenticity and intimacy [has] increasingly privileged novels by those imagined as insiders as the most telling descriptions of minority communities" because "ethnic/minority literatures allow us glimpses of cultures to which we might not otherwise have access" (Ebron and Tsing 393; Hill 161). Ethnographic fiction, according to this view, will be a better "translator" of culture than any anthropologist's text, somehow capturing the essence of a culture as only a member of that culture can.

The acceptance of ethnographic fiction as a better ethnographic product suggests that the culture of an Other translates itself in the writing, that the author has no choice but to "accurately" represent it. The scholarship in folklore and fiction thus often neatly sidesteps issues of representation, since the method and form of representation is seen as an organic outgrowth of the culture from within which the author writes. This leads to what Rosemary Hathaway calls the "unbearable weight of authenticity," in which a (white) reader "assumes, when presented with a text where the writer and the group represented in the text are ethnically different from herself, that the text is necessarily an accurate, authentic, and authorized representation of that 'Other' cultural group" (169). She goes on to argue that "whereas authors may [self-consciously] employ 'folk' materials in order to subvert or challenge audience assumptions about the culture represented, readers instead often consume such materials as mimetically 'authentic'" (171). White readers therefore read Others' fictions as tourists, looking to re-compose the cultural life-world of the novel according to expectations of authenticity. Though there are gaps in Hathaway's argument, such as the absence of a consideration of the complex relationship of minority readers to minority texts and her assumptions of a monolithic "white" and "nonwhite" audience, her basic point is crucial: to read a novel simply as a type of ethnography disallows a more nuanced understanding of how folklore is performed by the author within the text itself. Thus, a touristic reading of a work of fiction is one that ignores the control an author has in the "translation" of her culture, and one that expects to see a representation of cultural authenticity, whether or not such authenticity is the writer's goal.

The "burden of authenticity" placed by opponents of new ethnography on traditional ethnographic texts--the burden of translating an authentic Truth of an Other culture--has now been displaced onto works of fiction by these Others. The type of touristic reading Hathaway identifies, which I believe is a result of this displacement, does not simply lead to an expanding worldview; instead, it serves to both reinforce preconceived cultural expectations of the reader and limit the agency of the writer. Readers are "allowed" a "glimpse" of an exotic culture, as if they are being given a gift or let in on a secret without always recognizing that that glimpse may have been constructed in a very specific way for their gaze. And the tendency to overlook the "partial truths" of novels by nonwhite authors betrays a still pervasive desire to locate authenticity within the text of an Other. So while the recognition of the fictiveness of ethnography that has come about in the years since Clifford proposed a "new ethnography" has prompted folklorists to be more aware of the power the ethnographer has to shape perceptions of authenticity, race, and culture, the reversal of the analogy--to read fiction as ethnography--has led some scholars to deny the fictiveness, or constructedness, of the fiction of nonwhite writers. A power is thus granted to (white) ethnographers that is denied to (nonwhite) fiction writers.

Metafictional novels, as opposed to "ethnographic" fictions, revel in their fictiveness. Simply put, metafiction calls attention to the artificiality of the text, its "constructed-hess," in order to make clear that "fiction cannot hope to mirror reality or tell the truth" since "'reality' and 'truth' are themselves fictional abstractions" (McCaffery 5). More broadly, it can be defined as a fiction that makes "a statement about the creation of that fiction" (Waugh 6). The metafictional novel, then, with its attempt to expose the constructions of both fiction and reality, seems to speak to many of the same concerns as a new ethnography focused on the fictive constructs present in ethnographic representations of the folk. In the critical debates about folklore and literature, however, there is little attention paid to the metafictional self-consciousness of contemporary fiction--even though the study of ethnographic fiction often locates itself in relation to Writing Culture and the self-consciousness of new ethnography. But because metafiction self-consciously draws attention to itself as fiction, for those who study ethnographic fiction and deny its fictiveness, Mumbo Jumbo represents a threat to the theoretical models of mimetic, representational reality that have been constructed.

In Mumbo Jumbo, an outbreak of "Jes Grew" has begun to sweep the nation, an infection that "knows no class no race no consciousness. It is self-propagating and you can never tell when it will hit" (5). Reed never fully explains what "Jes Grew" is, for it is impossible to "bring into focus or categorize; once we call it 1 thing it forms into something else" (4). However, Jes Grew is connected with emotion, with orality, with feeling and knowing something outside what the dominant Atonist Order (Western Christianity) has allowed. Jes Grew is "characterized by ebullience and ecstasy," and Atonists feel that it must be stopped. Its Text, presumably the original Book of Toth, has fallen out of Atonist hands, and they are frantically searching for it--for the Atonists believe that "they can dissolve the symptoms of Jes Grew by destroying their source": the Text (McGee 92-93). PaPa LaBas is the trickster detective seeking the clues to Jes Grew and the Text, racing the Atonists for its possession. (5)

Ultimately, PaPa LaBas and his small band of followers discover that the Text has been destroyed by Abdul Hamid, a young black Muslim, but not before they reveal to a crowd of Atonists and "New Negroes" the true story of the Egyptian brothers Osiris and Set, illuminating "the origin of racial conflict and of the tyranny of the Text" (Lock 73). Set, the empirically minded mythical ancestor of the Atonists, murders his Dionysian brother Osiris and scatters parts of his body throughout the world. Clearly a metaphor for the African diaspora, as Osiris is equated with the people who become the vessel for Jes Grew, Osiris's Book of Toth is thought to be the first "anthology" of black literature but instead of being comprised of words, it is choreography, music, emotion. It is "the 'text' of the black experience as a whole" (Fox 55). Although the Text is destroyed (after being rejected by a black editor who said that it "lacked 'soul' and wasn't 'Nation' enough") and the Jes Grew epidemic quiets, there is "no end and no beginning" to the phenomenon (98, 204). PaPa LaBas is not discouraged by the destruction of the Text: "Jes Grew is life.... We will make our own future texts," he says (204). "The purpose of Mumbo Jumbo," argues Helen Lock, "is to show that the Text they are seeking would be counter-productive, in that it would emasculate a living, evolving phenomenon" (70). I would argue that Jes Grew does not allow its Text to be found. The search for it, which leads PaPa LaBas's skeptical daughter to declare "I believe in Jes Grew now," is what keeps Jes Grew alive (206). Its future ultimately does not depend on its textualization or on the compilation of anthologies, but the conventions of the Text do not create or destroy Jes Grew. (6)

Reed's constant questioning of Texts and the violence of cultural appropriation and representation seems to speak directly to the core of new ethnography--so why is this novel not invoked more often? Mumbo Jumbo, as a novel that "shows its seams," is a manifestation of the fears scholars had of new ethnography. Many anthropologists and folklorists carefully considered the claims of Clifford and other "new ethnographers," and did reconceptualize their views on the relationship between ethnography and representation. But others, like Maryon McDonald, were not convinced, and her "heart" sank to her "boots at every novelty-claiming and enthusing espousal of Writing Culture" (20). This backlash reveals interesting connections to some of Reed's more trenchant critics, the proponents of the New Black Aesthetic--aligning Addison Gayle, Jr., Houston Baker, and Larry Neal, even with their sometimes differing points of view, with those who argue against new ethnography. The most pervasive objection to new ethnography is that it betrays what ethnography fundamentally is--or at least, what it is supposed to be: "depictions of local life" that "capture" the "perspective and meanings of those studied" (Emerson, "Face" 46). Joel Best criticizes the "postmodern fad" articulated in Writing Culture by arguing that if "the analyst inevitably shapes the analysis, as the reasoning goes, we should focus our attention, not on the subject of analysis, but on the analytic act. The focus shifts from social life to the analyst's self, a shift which is self-centered, self-congratulatory, and self-indulgent" (128). Likewise, Amiri Baraka wrote about the failures of "technical innovators" like Jean Toomer, whose "mysticism" led to the "repudiation of blackness," and Zora Neale Hurston, who Baraka argued "ends up writing articles against voting rights for blacks ... among other things" (314). Folklorists similarly claim that ethnography should always seek to enact an "increased representation for a greater variety of the world's people" and thus be "focused on studying people who lack power" because the ethnographic process should be self-less, not self-indulgent (Ritchie 365; Shuman and Briggs 123). Ethnographers, then, should not spend so much time focusing on the text and the method of representation, which would be a self-indulgent foray into aesthetics, because "we have literature to do that" (Noycs qtd. in Lawless, "From the Editor" 4).

Much like folklorists who believe that they should be "focused on studying people who lack power," Gayle, a major proponent of the black aesthetic, argued that the "major criterion for the evaluation of art" had to include the question: "How much better has the work of art made the life of a single human being on this planet?" (Way 379). Literature which had "no socially uplifting purpose" was "attempting to deceive poor and black people," because the most important function of Black Art had to be the fight against American racism (Martin 34; Gayle, "Blueprint" 43). This emphasis on social function, Madalyn Jablon argues, led many critics in the Black Arts Movement to identify realism as the form of literature most conducive to the voicing of social commentary. Here we see a shared concern between those in the Black Arts Movement and folklorists, and the correlation between social realism and traditional ethnography: the move to "give voice" that folklorist Susan Ritchie astutely criticizes has long been a central desire in folklore studies, which "in its search for the Others of the modern industrial social text has historically manifested a disciplinary concern with the mute" (Ritchie 365). (7) For believers in traditional forms of realist ethnography, the voice heard is the ethnographer's. For proponents of the New Black Aesthetic, though, it is the voice of the oppressed that must be heard through the medium of social realism.

In addition to the distrust of the "self-indulgence" of self-conscious writing was the fear that new ethnographic texts would come to rely less on empirical observations gained through intimate, sustained contact between the ethnographer and subject/Other and more on literary devices and experimentation, moving the ethnography away from a scientifically rendered Truth toward artistically rendered partial truths. To some, this suggested the possibility of ethnography without fieldwork, literature without scientifically verified authenticity. By focusing on the literary aspects of the ethnographic project, the feeling was that the ethnographer would privilege the end product--the text. Anthropologist Jonathan Spencer claims that "anthropology is as much a way of working--a kind of practical activity--as it is a way of writing" (145). The goal, he maintains, is to "translate cultures," and ethnography is crucial because of "the clarification it offers" (151; 146). While to include some kind of self-reflexivity could help the ethnographer better achieve these goals of authentic translation and clarification, Spencer argues, it would in no way fundamentally shift the paradigms of ethnographic research, the real work, only the product, the writing. Folklorist Dorothy Noyes reiterates his point, arguing that by focusing exclusively on the method of representation, "we may, in the end, unwittingly fetishize the evocative 'text,' forgetting the long, hard efforts of fieldwork that should be preliminary to any ethnographic writing" (qtd. in Lawless, "From the Editor" 5). But who gets to experience the long days, weeks, or months of ethnographic research? Only the researcher. To claim that self-consciousness and reflexivity should have only a marginal place in ethnographic writing because it fetishizes the text is to overlook the problem that for all but the researcher, the text is the research--not only is it a representation of the subject, the Other, it is a representation of the work. This argument against new ethnography assumes that the researcher is experiencing (and writing about in field notes) an empirically and authentically "true" reality that is only not true in the final representational text. In his novel Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Reed asks the "neo-social realist gang" leader Bo Schmo, "what if I write circuses?" Similarly in Mumbo Jumbo, the metafictional "circus" that Reed writes confounds the expectations not just Truth in text, but truth in reality.

A distrust of relativism also figures in much of the resistance to new ethnography. Cultural relativism--an important theme of Mumbo Jumbo--posits that there is no single Truth, only relative [partial] truths. It is seemingly a nice fit in anthropological and folkloristic theory and practice, because it validates other cultures and the work of ethnographers; however, it is not actually considered a serious threat to most ethnographic realism. The well-known problems of cultural relativism--that it as a theory that must apply to itself and therefore may be "false from the perspective of other cultures or frameworks"--allowed many anthropologists to dismiss Clifford's concerns (Hammersley 106). (8) Martyn Hammersley maintains that "claims about the superiority of ethnography are based precisely on the grounds that it is able to get closer to social reality than other [primarily literary] methods," not only dismissing the relativist argument that multiple realities exist, but also apparently suggesting that the language and practice of ethnography can lead to a truer, thus superior, representation of social reality (103). According to this view of ethnography, the more fieldwork that is done, and the more interviews that are conducted, the closer the ethnographer gets to the truth of the Other. That truth, then, will be better represented in a mimetic text exempt from literary concerns; while reflexivity may be a useful tool in that mimesis, an essential, nonrelative, authentic truth exists, and can be accessed through ethnography.

It was in part to address similar concerns in the Black Arts Movement that Reed wrote Mumbo Jumbo, a novel which, like new ethnography, calls for a relativistic understanding of the world. In the novel, a "sick mind" was one which "sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Something like filling a milk bottle with an ocean" (24). Loas are spirits or gods of Vodou, and they are neither good nor bad, neither always right nor always wrong. Loas encompass the whole range of human experience, so that they may better understand the humanity of those who call on them for help. Above all, they are never static: there is no single, defining characteristic of loas, no fixed pantheon. To "interpret the world by using a single loa" is not only "sick," it is incomprehensible to those who understand Vodou. Reed felt that the New Black Aesthetic movement--or the "goon squad aesthetic" and "neo-social realist gang," as he called it--was another way to esssentialize African Americans and African American culture and deny the flexibility of the loas. He reminds "those who've forgotten" that the "mainstream aspiration of Afro-Americans is for more freedom, and not slavery--including freedom of artistic expression" (Shrovetide 298). In Mumbo Jumbo, when the poet Major Young asks, "It is necessary for us to write the same way?" Reed is speaking not only to a white society that expected the work of African Americans to be "raw and earthy," but also to those black critics whose demands included the production of empirically True social realism (102).

The value of self-conscious forms of ethnographic representation is at the heart of the debate over new ethnography, and an important focus of debate in the New Black Aesthetic. Reed was initially well received by New Black Aesthetic critics such as Gayle, Baker, and Hoyt Fuller, who lists Reed's early novels among the "strong and viable works that speak directly to the revolutionary black sensibility" (Fuller 368). Both Reed and proponents of the New Black Aesthetic claimed the dismantling of Western hegemony as a primary goal, and they each sought to make clear the value of African American fiction and to affirm that "unique experiences produce unique cultural artifacts" (Gayle, Aesthetic xxiv). As Gayle himself said, "Black artists must refuse to accept the American definition of reality and propose a Black definition instead" ("Blueprint" 43). But why did the overtly metafictional qualities of Reed's work quickly set him at odds with many of the era's leading critics of African American literature, if the primary goal of metafictional writing is also to question the construction of reality and if, because "self-consciousness is as old as the storytelling tradition itself," there has been a long tradition of black metafictional writers? (Jablon 13). Reed's claim that he saw "writing as a fine art, not just as a medium for telling a story" clearly staked out a ground in opposition to the basic tenets of many of the critics of the New Black Aesthetic, just as it aligned him with Clifford's and Geertz's calls for a self-consciousness in the writing of ethnography ("Ishmael Reed" 138).

Reed's attention to form and the "fine art" of writing, even if it was meant as a way to parody, question, satirize, and ridicule the dominant Western aesthetic, was seen as "a shirking of responsibility on his part," and his synchronic, label-defying "textual structure" was called "an attempt to escape discussing critical social issues" (Martin 42). By not accepting that Reed's historiographic metafiction, to borrow Linda Hutcheon's term, was in fact a way to question who has the power to write history and construct social reality, many New Black Aesthetic critics skimmed over Reed's desire to discuss the complexity and deep-seated history of racial prejudice by often focusing instead on issues like Reed's inclusion of "negative stereotypes" of African Americans in his work. But the overarching theme of Mumbo Jumbo--in addition to its pointed commentary on issues ranging from the West's consistent and violent appropriation of African cultural forms to the failures of white liberalism--is that the West does not have complete epistemological control over history and the writing of culture, that alternative histories can and do exist. These histories pop up from time to time, and it is the job of artists and thinkers, musicians and hoodoo practitioners, to "keep Jes' Grew alive." (9)

The qualities of Mumbo Jumbo that fail to meet a similar criteria established by the literary study of folklore as to what an authentic "ethnic" text looks like are criteria that help to reinscribe many of the same strictures that Reed was writing against in the 1970s. I argue that Mumbo Jumbo could be a critical text for those folklorists who want to invoke Clifford's arguments for the connections between literature and ethnography and problematize the essentialist trap of fixing all nonwhite writers solely as translators of culture for white audiences. However, Reed's self-conscious attention to form and his metafictional tendencies remove the novel from the realm of the "authentic," placing it not only at odds with the New Black Aesthetic critics, but also outside the purview of folklorists who define authenticity as a, if not the, key marker of the success or failure of the folklore in the fiction. His use of parody and his metafictive attention to form removes the novel from the "true" folk experience by inserting a disruptive distance between the sign and the signified. If readers look to ethnographic fiction as "better representations of culture than standard academic ethnographies," that distance becomes hard to navigate without a willingness to understand self-conscious fiction (Hill 161). And since self-conscious fiction, with its "refusal to retain any moorings in social reality," does not rely on the mimetic representations of realism, folklorists seem to overlook it (Graft 209). Without the lens of metafiction, Mumbo Jumbo does not appear to be an ethnographic rendering of the local, the communal, or the self within a folkloric matrix. If metafiction "self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality," then the very core of ethnographic work, a clarification of Truth as free of fiction as possible, is in danger (Waugh 2). The demand for both ethnographic and social realism, whether in traditional ethnography or in literature, leaves very little space for Reed.

Mumbo Jumbo's overtly metafictional aspects clearly mark the novel as one that is concerned with the constructions of mythic history and social reality. One reviewer argued that "Reed does not write mythically--he writes about writing mythically" (Schmitz 132; emphasis added). It is this aspect of his writing, I believe, that ultimately separates Reed from other writers that folklorists do study. For a writer like Leslie Marmon Silko, who also plays with literary form, folklorists tend to naturalize self-consciousness. Alesia Garcia, in writing about Silko's "Yellow Woman," argues that "indigenous stories give voice to conquered Native cultures" (5). She goes on to suggest that "Silko enacts emergent Pueblo theories of storytelling, or the theory of the web, which in its criss-cross pattern represents a literary tradition that is just as important and complex as dominant literary theories" (12). She is speaking of Silko's form, of the way she "spins" the story of Yellow Woman in a linked and concentric pattern the way that a spider instinctively knows how to spin a web. I point this out not to deny the validity of Garcia's argument, but to show that scholars often use the language of the "natural" when talking about those writing from within minority cultures.

Like those who argue that the black aesthetic at its core looks different from Western literature, including Reed himself, folklorists are also willing to consider the folklore in a text even if that folklore seems fantastical to a society that still values the Enlightenment ideals of reason and empiricism. For example, folklore scholar Elaine Lawless makes the compelling argument that what is labeled "magical realism" by most literary critics (only because they have no other term for it) is in fact mimectic realism because an audience of writers like Toni Morrison "knew how ghosts lived amongst them; spirits were second nature" ("Performing"). What is called magical realism, then, is not a literary device but instead a representation of culture that is somehow closer to the truth than a work that would seem more realistic and mimetic from a Western point of view. These are novels that can be read as an answer to Gayle's call to propose "Black definitions" of reality to replace traditional "American" definitions. These are authors who are writing "out of their ethnic backgrounds and sensibilities, their belief system ... and through their mythic and storytelling traditions." To even claim that a "magical realist" writer is writing against the grain, Lawless suggests, once again destructively "privileges that grain" ("Performing").

These arguments about Silko and Morrison are crucial to the study of literature, and like similar arguments made by critics in the Black Arts Movement, they challenge a system of Western (literary) oppression. Lawless's main contention, that folklorists must be more aware of the colonialist tendency to label anything nonwhite as somehow less "accurate" because it is more "mythic," is central to both my and Reed's argument. But my concern is that the response in the study of folklore and fiction has overcorrected. By locating this challenging of the tenets of Western fiction primarily to writers who are not white, and particularly to an expression of their racial identity, we as scholars are bringing a different set of expectations to the texts of white and nonwhite writers. While it is crucial to understand the different cultural paradigms within which a work is produced--as Edward Said wrote, for the Orientalist, "the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West"--these expectations can also rest on several problematic assumptions: that the ethnic writer writes only from his or her own ethnic background, eschewing the complications of colonialism and globalization and creating a space for the denial of an author's very self-conscious engagement with Western literary traditions; that their voice is only an ethnic or minority one; that nonwhite writers are automatically insider ethnographers; and that the tradition from which they are writing does not have its own set of conventions and forms with which their work actively engages. But most of all, these expectations open the door for scholars to reinscribe a colonial passivity to ethnic writers, the kind of passivity that can deny the ways in which the oppressed interact with their oppressors.

As I have suggested above, it has become commonplace, even expected, for us to read minority novels ethnographically--but only a particular kind of novel from a particular kind of writer. To read Mumbo Jumbo ethnographically would require us to rethink our ideas of the form and function of folklore and ethnography. To begin with, the "sickness" of a "single loa," and Reed's investment in a type of cultural relativism, could in the eyes of folklorists render Mumbo Jumbo inauthentic, since the acknowledgment that multiple realities exist serves to undermine the colonial authority and power of the ethnographer to present the Truth of one reality. Reed does not represent a mass, homogenous view of a racial "folk" in his work; with his amalgamation of hoodoo practitioners, New Negroes, Baptist preachers from Re-Mote, Mississippi, Black Muslims, Talking Androids, and two-thousand-year-old crusaders, readers have to search hard for the "folk" Reed, through his position as a minority writer and therefore a presumed insider ethnographer, is supposed to translate. He insists instead on the relevancy of multiple perspectives, even if those perspectives are rejected because they "lack 'soul' " and aren't "'Nation' enough" (98). Because he questions the "authenticity" of any single representation, his work falls outside of the consideration of both opponents of new ethnography and folklorists who study fiction.

With Reed's relativism comes a willingness to present African American characters in a negative light, one of the most common criticisms made of his work he leaves no stereotype untouched or unrepresented. In the same vein that many participants in the Black Arts Movement tended to ignore works of fiction that "did not fit" their "scheme of cultural nationalism," if folkloristics is supposed to speak for those without power, how can it justify taking seriously a novel that seems to ridicule and parody the very people folklorists want to represent, and in return see represented, in fiction? (Christian 285) Folklore has always had too much invested in the celebration of differences between cultures, to the point that a large amount of pedestrian fieldwork glosses over real complexity in favor of unchecked, exoticized enthusiasm for the Other. Folklorists Amy Shuman and Charles Briggs sought to address this problem by interrogating the "politics of culture." In their introduction to a special issue of Western Folklore, they make the argument that "Folklorists were responsible for inventing a particular type of African American experience as authentic"--an authenticity that depended on the rural South and a population whose identity was still shackled almost exclusively to slavery. This view "not only perpetuated stereotypes about African Americans--it also made other experiences invisible" (124). And as John Roberts argues in that same issue, folklore as a discipline has "made it extremely difficult to recognize intra-group diversity as an influence on vernacular creativity" (158). These other experiences and diversities are represented, albeit in broad strokes, in Mumbo Jumbo. Reed resists what he calls the "dehumanizing process" of presenting characters of any race who "can do no wrong": Reed wrote Mumbo Jumbo in part to challenge the notion that only a very limited type of African American fiction was valid, much like folklorists would only accept a certain African American experience as "authentic" and therefore worthy of study ("Ishmael Reed" 139). The novel's neglect by folklorists who study literature not only provides evidence for Shuman, Briggs, and Roberts's argument, it also once again links the demands of the New Black Aesthetic to folklorists who maintain the "invisibility" of other African American experiences. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., argues that "Reed criticizes the Afro-American idealism of a transcendent black subject, integral and whole, self-sufficient, and plentiful, the 'always already' black signified, available for literary representation in received Western forms as would be the water dippered from a deep and dark well" (701). It is my argument that folklorists who study literature too often search for this dark well, expecting to dip into the essence of a "transcendent" subject mimetically rendered in a novel by an authentic representative of that subject position, someone who can write it as he knows it. Mumbo Jumbo confounds such expectations.

Considering Mumbo Jumbo as an ethnographic text also directly challenges those who fear that the emphasis placed on the text fetishizes the product and devalues the process. With all of his emphasis on the Text--an emphasis only heightened by the novel's metafictional qualities--Reed does in fact seem to fetishize the product. Mumbo Jumbo is a "mimesis of process," which sees "artistic process as a metaphor for identity and self-invention," with a "focus on the experiences of the artist rather than just on the artwork and its effects on an audience" (Jablon 29). It is this kind of "self-indulgent" writing that anthropologists like Joel Best fear in ethnographies. Mumbo Jumbo, though, also argues against the fetishization of the Text it is the search for the truth of the Text that keeps Jes Grew alive while acknowledging that its empirical, written Text can never be accessed. But it is not just a process of artistic communication that Reed documents in his novel. He is explicitly concerned with the construction of social scripts and human understanding of history--the process of making meaning, which is a central issue in the study of folklore. To claim that new ethnography or the study of self-conscious ethnographic fiction will erase the process of ethnography and replace it with a reified Text is to ignore the possibility that a writer's text, in its very form of representation, can speak to its own process of creation. By reading Mumbo Jumbo ethnographically, we could rethink our approach to texts as cultural tourists and our assumptions of an easy cultural translation as the raison d'etre of the literature of minority writers.

As Lawless suggests, folklore scholars should always keep pointing "to the relevance and immediacy of folklore and how the study of tradition, belief, and oral narratives discourse provides a window into all the myriad kind of literature that we are reading, writing, and teaching in the new millennium" ("Out of the Ashes" 92). Folkloristics, with its insistence on the importance of the local and its willingness to place value in cultural forms deemed "less than" by Western academic institutions, offers the opportunity to more fully understand the ways in which those who are oppressed actually do speak. But though the work of folklorists and literary scholars to read and understand literature through a lens not bound by Western aesthetic values is not only commendable but imperative, it can also sometimes blind us to our own reliance on colonialist narratives of race that suggest cultural passivity, and as Reed contends, continue to fix the Other as "raw and earthy." The promises of a "new" ethnography that were offered by Clifford and Marcus have now become part of the common language of ethnographic theory: but just as many ethnographers continue to resist its claims, those who study the connections between folklore and fiction, even while embracing the promises of "partial truths," still engage racialized and naturalized colonialist narratives.

We can begin to question these narratives by engaging the fiction of writers, like Reed, who do not seem to be ideal representatives for a homogenous folk group. This would not only trouble the divide between center and margin, self and other, but it would open up the definition of ethnographic fiction to allow a further disintegration of colonialist notions of folk and "nonfolk," a dichotomy with problematic connections to the power of representation (the "folk" are who the "nonfolk" write about). To look at works of fiction with metafictive elements would also perhaps destabilize our notion of the folk. Metafiction's goal is often to emphasize the construction of fiction in order to examine the construction of reality, because "in showing us how literary fiction creates its imaginary worlds, metafiction helps us to understand how the reality we live day by day is similarly constructed, similarly 'written.'" (Waugh 18-19). If we can begin to question the way in which the folk construct their own reality both in text and in context, we can perhaps move past the tendency to examine only the difference between cultures instead of differences within cultures. Joe Weixlmann argues that "the status of 'fiction' need not be viewed as less than--or even other than--what commonly passes for reality" (63). A problem I see in the study of ethnographic fiction is not its willingness to view fiction as the same as what "commonly passes for reality"--that is being done. Instead, it is the tendency to often look unquestioningly at ethnographic fiction as an organic, rather than creative act, and its propensity to ignore fiction that "shows its seams." We have to understand that the writers of "ethnographic fictions" are active participants in their work, not passive receptacles and always-willing translators for the folk beliefs of his or her folk culture(s). Only by "asking again" about the relationship between our constructions of race and the study of folklore can we "ask again" about the nature of literature and ethnography, and only by "asking again" can we start to dissolve the colonialist narratives that have been part of the field of folklore since its beginnings.

Works Cited

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Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The 'Blackness of Blackness': A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey." Critical Inquiry 9.4 (June 1983): 685-723.

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--. "Performing Fiction(s): What Literary Scholars Do Not Know about Magical Realism Matters." Louisiana Folklore Society Annual Meeting. U of Louisiana-Lafayette. April 2003.

Lindroth, James. "Images of Subversion: Ishmael Reed and the Hoodoo Trickster." African American Review 30.2 (Summer 1996): 185-96.

Lock, Helen. "'A Man's Story is his Gris-gris': Ishmael Reed's Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic and the African American Tradition." South Central Review 10.1 (Spring 1993): 67-77.

Martin, Reginald. Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics. New York: St. Martin's, 1988.

McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Cass. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1982.

McDonald, Maryon. "Postmodernism, Socialism and Ethnography." Anthropology Today 7.5 (October 1991): 19-20.

McGee, Patrick. Ishmael Reed and the Ends of Race. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.

Napier, Winston, ed. African American Literary Theory: A Reader. New York: New York UP, 2000.

Reed, Ishmael. "Ishmael Reed: A Conversation with John Domini." 1977. Conversations with Ishmael Reed. Eds. Bruce Dick and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. 128-43.

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Notes

(1.) Most ethnographers trace this movement toward reflexivity in anthropology to a footnote in Geertz's now famous 1973 essay "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture." Geertz simply states that "self-consciousness about modes of representation (not to speak of experiments with them) has been very lacking in anthropology" (75n3).

(2.) The debate around folklorists' conceptions of "the folk" has been going on for decades. Shuman, for example, notes the "gradual displacement" in folklore studies of the belief that only "peasants, male-risk-taking occupational groups (loggers, whalers, etc.,) or 'native,' tribal, or otherwise authentic others (such as Native American, Afro-Americans, or the elderly)" have folklore (349).

(3.) A notable exception is Cristina Bacchilega, "Folktales, Fictions and Meta-Fictions: Their Interaction in Robert Coover's Pricksongs & Descants," New York Folklore 6.3-4 (1980): 171-84.

(4.) In Gordon and Behar's Women Writing Culture, for example, the literary writers discussed in essays throughout the collection are: Mourning Dove, credited as the first female Native American novelist; African American novelists Mice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Toni Morrison; Asian American writers Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan; and Israeli "border poets," who are "cast into minority status because [of] their Mizrahi and Palestinian backgrounds" (Behar 20). The white women whose work was examined in this collection were all ethnographers, including Elsie Clews Parson, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. In DeCaro and Jordan's latest collection on folklore and literature, Re-Situating Folklore, the authors do treat novels by white writers, like Jay McInemey, E. M. Forster, Margaret Atwood, and Anne Tyler, but they do so in very traditional ways: by looking at the author's use of nursery rhymes, proverbs, fairy-tale motifs, and quilts, respectively. For example, they spend a chapter comparing McInerney's Story of My Life and Aria Castillo's So Far from God, a novel whose context "is an ethnic one--New Mexico Chicano" (35). They argue that So Far from God "stands in contrast to Story of My Life" because the folklore in McInerney's novel is "a very small part of the larger cultural lifeworld in which that character exists. In Castillo's novel the folklore seems to pervade every comer of the book's cultural scene" (35). The authors also make the more problematic statement that folklore functions in pre- and semiliterate societies the way that literature works in literate societies. Their intention seems to be to equalize the two--"they" have folklore, "we" have literature--but the result is a much more problematic re-hierarchizing of literature as the result of modernization, while folklore remains a vestige of the pre-modem Other. And their objects of study still speak to this longing for the premodern: quilts, proverbs, folktales, nursery rhymes.

(5.) PaPa LaBas is an incarnation of the Vodou loa Legba, the guardian of crossroads, doorways, and barriers. Esu is most likely the ancestor of Legba--Esu is the Yomba god who has been transfigured in diasporic folklore into a trickster who is "driven by a mocking wit that subverts white authority and destroys white illusions of superiority while simultaneously promoting numerous value-laden symbols of black culture" (Lindroth 185). In Haiti, Legba is often called PaPa Legba. In American "hoodoo," he is often referred to as PaPa LeBas. Reed's PaPa LeBas is "two-headed," a "obeah man," putting him firmly within the realm of Vodou and West African religion. Because of his position as a cultural trickster occupying a liminal space that is neither one thing nor the other, PaPa LaBas is perhaps the figure in Reed's Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic most capable of fully exploring cultural crossroads.

(6.) Many of the characteristics of metafiction that Waugh identifies are at play in Mumbo Jumbo. For example, "ostentation typographic experiment," like Reed's inclusion of images and figures, his playfulness with font, and his substitution of "1" for "one," calls attention to the physical existence of the novel (22). More generally, Reed's direct comments on the writing of history--the writing of anything, really--attest to his affinity with other metafictional writers, like the intrusion of the authorial voice by signing asides "I. R.," (e.g., 45, 146) to remind the reader that someone outside the text has had control over what is being read. We must consider, though, Reed's naming of the "Neo-Hoodoo Aesthetic." Reed does not disrupt traditional form of the novel, in Mumbo Jumbo and other work, because the exhaustion of (Western) literature has forced him to find new ways of telling stories, as John Barth famously postulated. Reed called his style a "NeoHooDoo Aesthetic," seeking to employ "Vodou notions of time" in order to show "how contemporary the past is in our culture" and to present an alternative to Western ideology ("Ishmael Reed" 139-40). Schmitz, an early critic of Reed, used this distinction to differentiate Reed from emerging "postmodern" and "metafictional" writers like Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Barthelme, arguing that "Reed ... is not primarily concerned with the insufficient of literary form or the intrinsic value of writing" (130). Though I disagree with Schmitz about Reed's attitude toward the "intrinsic value of writing," it is important that we see that Reed was not blindly taking part in the rising postmodemist trend because of literary "exhaustion," but rather because of a more pointed attack on the Western literary ethos itself. However, as Schmitz himself points out at the end of his discussion, "Reed's Neo-HooDooist moves finally along the same metafictive angle that Pynchon and Barthelme take in their fiction." The differences between Reed and other (white) postmodernist writers are found instead in the "milieu and idiom" of his fiction and in his belief that, as Schmitz quotes Reed, "print and words are not dead at all"--not in "the fictional tactics" of his novels (139).

(7.) Ritchie argues that folklorists often participate in this same kind of act, using what she calls "ventriloquism" in an effort to speak for people. For this act to be successful, though, she argues that meaningful difference has to be erased. Ritchie questions the idea that "giving voice" is the only way to overcome the oppression of Orientahst and capitalist paradigms. She argues: "Folklorists assuming that it is possible to correct" political oppression "through the restoration of the voices of the folk within a largely academic discourse only recall the original and necessarily absent object and reinforce the omnipresent authority of the original ethnographic text and the already overdetermined character of the supposedly generic universal subject" (372).

(8.) Continuing this line of reasoning, Thomas argues that even texts that make a pass at cultural relativism often fail, for "the most persuasive and theoretically consequential ethnographic rhetoric represents the other essentially as an inversion of whatever Western institution, practice, or set of notions is the real object of interest" (310). He suggests that while ethnographic relativists posit that, for example, the kinship system of a particular aboriginal tribe in Australia is not inferior to, but just different from Western systems, they are still written as different, an "inversion" of the "Western institution." Therefore, these scholars see cultural relativism as doomed to fail as long as the ethnographer is grounded in a Western cultural paradigm.

(9.) Martin gives a succinct list of reasons why Reed's work "failed to meet the demanded criteria from the major aestheticians." Some of those qualities included Reed's use of humor and satire, the surreal quality of his work, and the deceptively flat characters that populate his novels. See Martin 42-43.