Ishmael Reed's Multi-Culture: The Production of Cultural Perspective

Abstract

All of Ismael Reed's literary efforts - his fiction, poetry, essays, his promotions of other novelists and poets - support an idea which he calls the multi-culture: an amalgamation of perspectives, art forms, and lifestyles from different cultures, past and present. In his Preface to Calafia: The California Poetry, the latest of several collections of multi-ethnic writing he has edited, he describes the anthology as one which attempts to bring together the poetry of different California cultures one roof (xiii). His novels also reveal this sort of attempt to bring different cultures under one roof, but here his cultural house includes perspectives from ancient Egypt, Medieval Europe, Nineteenth century Haiti, and the American Old West, to name but a few. Reed envisions the multi-culture as a sort of collective consciousness to be created through cultural exchanges between individuals and groups which will revitalize not only their individual experiences but their culture as well. His kaleidoscopic surveys of history, art, and religion in his literature are based on the general conviction that a diversity of realities is more of an asset than a liability in furthering self-understanding as well as tolerance of the family of man. But more specifically, those surveys are organized around the cultural contributions made by ethnic groups within the United States to the country as a whole, contributions which Reed feels have not been given the recognitions they deserve by the majority of the American populace, past or present. As a black writer, one of his literary objectives is to present the cultural heritage of Afro-Americans as a rich combination of traditions and influences which in turn have contributed more to