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Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of Control

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kathryn Hume
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Abstract

Ishmael Reed's disparate novels analyze control: its origins; its relation to patterns of racial domination in American history; and its role in sex, business, religion, and government. Foucauldian control offers a way to analyze human interactions, as do Freudian theories of sexuality and Marxist economics. American control artists, including Reed, Acker, Burroughs, Mailer, and Pynchon, offer a strangely similar set of visionary concerns: problems with sexual identity, images of homosexuality, grotesque presentations of heads of state, efflorescent anality, magic, and radical revisions of foundational myths. More successfully than these other satirists, Reed manages to suggest an answer to the problematics of control — an alternative social structure, whose center is the cultivation of certain pleasures rather than macho courage, delayed gratification, self-control, or unattached drifting.

Type
Cluster: Readings of Narrative, 1937-87
Information
PMLA , Volume 108 , Issue 3 , May 1993 , pp. 506 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1993

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