MUMBO JUMBO (First Ed. 1972)

223pp. Hardcover binding with dust jacket. With several monochrome photographs. Jacket in fair condition, with some rubbing, edgewear, open and closed tears, and repair on front hinge with tape. Jacket has been covered with protective plastic sleeve after photos were taken. Book: Good-very good. Slight rubbing and slight and small stains to boards, one minor indentation to rear board, slight shelfwear to top and tail of spine. Very small stains to endpapers, slight stains to top edge of textblock. Text and photos are clean. Well bound.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbo_Jumbo_(novel):

Mumbo Jumbo is a 1972 novel by Ishmael Reed. It centres on a dance mania and spiritual ″anti-plague″ of African origin called Jes’ Grew, whose spread across the United States brings about the Jazz Age. The action takes place in the 1920s New York, where Papa LaBas, a Vodou practitioner, searches for a sacred anthology that will allow Jes’ Grew to “go pandemic.” He is opposed by a secret society called the Atonist order, which seeks to destroy Jes’ Grew in the name of protecting their Eurocentric vision of Western civilization.

The novel uses myth, allegory, conspiracy, and caricature to satirically reimagine the Harlem Renaissance, in a style that is generally considered postmodern. One of its main themes is the relationship between African-American culture and American culture more broadly—in particular, recurring cycles of appreciation and marginalization. Another is cultural appropriation, including both the mainstream assimilation of black creative expression and the struggle of black artists to adapt traditionally Western forms. Reed’s portrayal of both dynamics is informed by spirit possession in Vodou, whose syncretism he embraced as a literary model in his 1970 poem “Neo-HooDoo Manifesto.”

Mumbo Jumbo was nominated for the 1973 National Book Award for Fiction after its publication by Doubleday in 1972. Reed’s best known novel, it has been translated into several languages, and was rereleased as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2017. It has been cited as an influence by a wide range of writers, artists, and scholars, including Thomas Pynchon, Colson Whitehead, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose reading of the novel inspired his theory of the African-American literary tradition in The Signifying Monkey.

Size: 8vo (21,4 x 14,7cm)

New York: Doubleday, 1972