Postmodernism, traditional cultural forms, and the African American narrative: Major's Reflex, Morrison's Jazz, and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Spring 2002 by Hogue, W Lawrence

African American writers since at least the 1960s have attempted to engage textually the limitations of Enlightenment reason, the violence of what Enrique Dussel calls the "myth of modernity," the representation of the African American as Other than reason, and the postmodern African American experience. Unlike most white American postmodernists, most African American postmodern writers are not inclined to neglect moral and social issues, particularly racial issues, in their narratives. They are deeply concerned with "fictive visions that focus on truths about the perversity of American racism" and how that racism defines the African American as devalued Other (Bell 6). In their fiction, they are "not merely rejecting [reason and] the arrogance and anachronism of Western forms and conventions" (Bell 6). These writers are looking for new forms in which to represent the African American. Thus, to define the African American according to his own logic and distinct subjectivity, they exhume and reaffirm from the periphery African American cultural and vernacular forms.

The general understanding of postmodernity as a new socio-cultural and socio-economic era emphasizes discontinuity, the fragmented, decentered subject, and the rejection of those postulates that are totalizing, metaphysical, and essentialist. Postmodernism is its cultural and literary arm. Since postmodernism is a reaction to modernism and Western reason-which is dominating, victimizing, hierarchical, and violent-and such other Enlightenment ideas as linearity, notions of progress and closure, as well as white supremacy-in this article, I want to examine three different ways African American writers use postmodern and jazz aesthetic techniques to critique modernity's imposition of a philosophy of enlightenment and, at the same time, engage the violence of the myth of modernity. I want to explore how these African American writers use traditional African American cultural forms as peripheral paradigms to offer alternatives to the representation of the African American as inferior, victimized, or Other than reason. I will look specifically at Clarence Major's Reflex and Bone Structure, Toni Morrison's Jazz, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. All three texts attack instrumental reason. All three produce a fluid, indeterminate, and self-consciously postmodern fiction in hopes of liberating the African American from the position of Other than reason: Major in Reflex, by defining the African American experience as the Same as other human experiences; Morrison in Jazz, by representing African American experience as merely different from Western reason; and Reed in Mumbo Jumbo, by defining the African American experience as a reason of the Other with its own logic, agency, and distinctive subjectivity. But first, I want to situate my discussion of these writers within the context of postmodernity as a critique of modernity and as a Eurocentric paradigm.

In "Beyond Eurocentrism," Dussel identifies two basic modern paradigms and argues that the type of critique one offers of modernity, and subsequently one's choice of postmodernism, is determined by the paradigm of modernity one chooses. The first modern paradigm delineated by Dussel conceptualizes a modernity (and later postmodernity) that is "exclusively European, developing in the Middle Ages and later on diffusing itself throughout the entire world" (3). Dussel shows that "[t]he chronology of this modern paradigm has its geopolitics: modern subjectivity develops spatially ... from the Italy of the Renaissance to the Germany of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, to the France of the French Revolution; throughout, Europe is central" (Dussel, "Beyond" 4). This first modern paradigm is an abstract rationalist universalism that conflates universality with Eurocentrism and developmental modernism.

According to this paradigm, Europe had exceptional internal characteristics that allowed it to supersede through its rationality all other non-European cultures, which are defined as the Other than (Eurocentric) reason. (Hence the violence of the myth of modernity.) "This [modern] paradigm," Dussel explains,

corresponds to the exigencies of efficacy, technological "factibility" or governmentalism of the management of an enormous world-system in expansion; it is the expression of a necessary process of simplification through "rationalization" of the life-world, of the subsystems (economic, political, cultural, religious, etc.). Rationalization ... is effect and not cause. But the effects of that simplifying rationalization to manage the world system are perhaps more profound and negative than Habermas or the postmoderns imagine. ("Beyond" 15)

Perhaps, that is, the effects prove to be more profound than European-centered postmoderns-whose main aim is to attack that simplified rationalization-are willing to admit.

This rationalization of the world involves postulating subjectivity as an ego, where the soul is defined as being distinct from the body, and "body is mere machine, ... entirely foreign to the soul" (Dussel, "Beyond" 15). It is here in the emerging modern traditions of Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger that Dussel argues the "suppression of the organic complexity" of life and world history is perceived ("Beyond" 16). The rationalization of the capitalist enterprise, the decorporealization of subjectivity, the separation of ethics from politics are all examples of diverse moments that are negated by a rationalization "apparently necessary for the management of the centrality of a world-system that Europe found itself in need of perpetually carrying out" (16). This exclusive European paradigm "has imposed itself not only in Europe and the United States, but in the entire intellectual realm of the world periphery" ("Beyond" 3-4). Thus, when we define modernity as an exclusively European-centered paradigm and write literature that is informed by this particular notion of modernity, we define not only the oppressed of the global periphery but also African Americans as Other than reason.