The Grapevine Telegraph "Jes Grew": Sonic Materialism, Afrofuturism and Information Theory in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo

Abstract

Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo situates the history of African American culture in the language of genetics, information theory, biocultural evolutionism and sonic/vibrant materialism. Reed's motif of “Jes Grew,” as an evolving acoustic entity vibrant through radio technology, signifies a codified medium of information storage and transfer; it stores and transfers black cultural information in a viral form, articulating it to the physicality and orality of the antebellum grapevine telegraph. Such a biosonic construction of African American experience provides fertile terrain to explore the marginalization and rehabilitation of black ontological forces. By dramatizing the production and transmission of black tonality, Reed's trope of “Jes Grew” signals vibrational forces that counteract Western, white cultural norms. Thus Mumbo Jumbo's trope of the Jes Grew virus participates in, and advances, the aesthetic politics of Afrofuturism, in which Jes Grew's bio-sonic effects enable us to contest the narrow humanism of Eurocentric biopolitics with an Afrofuturist sonic materialism. By the same token, the novel's description of 1920s Harlem revolves around an epistemological framework of modern technoculture in which biological research becomes a textualization of nature and DNA becomes an information storage and transfer system. Mumbo Jumbo perceives the biological human body as an outcome of dynamic interactions in which information networks and social, cultural and biological relations are scripted in textual and coded platforms of sonic materialism.