convention schmovention

What do you get when you take combine a history of the 1920s and African American culture with a novelistic structure and a complete disregard for academic conventions?

Mumbo Jumbo, of course.

In my opinion, Mumbo Jumbo reads as a history textbook which makes a halfhearted attempt, at best, at following in the traditional mold of history textbooks. The inclusion of footnotes (of which the first few, at least, seem to be mostly accurate) indicate a genuine attempt to be scholarly, but the narrative of the book is confusing and disjointed, jumping around erratically between different points in time where a usual textbook would progress linearly.

Emblematic of this trend is Reed’s choice (and presumably it is a choice) to leave the text littered with typos. Although Reed has apparently gone to the trouble of citing Warren Harding’s campaign slogan, he can’t be bothered to rid the novel of what are some pretty basic spelling errors. The book continues to maintain this trend past its transition into a novelistic format, eschewing quotation marks in favor of simply having characters speak. Instead of either following the rules or distancing himself from them, he picks and chooses, keeping certain things (like footnotes) that he sees a use for and disregarding the rest.

Having determined that these actions were likely intentional on Reed’s part, we now have to ask why he chose to write his book this way. I posit that Reed simply isn’t interested into playing into academia because he isn’t interested in playing into history as defined by white people. Why should Reed, an African-American writing a book about African-Americans, follow the rules set by white people? Jes Grew, as an intense and nation-consuming expression of black culture, challenges white cultural hegemony and is therefore dubbed a ‘plague’ by the white community, which seeks to exterminate it; in recording this phenomenon, does Reed really have an obligation to keep in with the style defined by white people? Is his choice to eschew convention a deliberate imitation of Jes Grew in its challenge to white society?

And what makes the established conventions so great anyway? A key aspect of postmodernism is challenging the concept that any one narrative or idea supersedes any other given narrative or idea. Yes, academic conventions might be conventions, but what makes one style of writing a historical work superior to another?

What do you guys think? What’s Reed’s motivation for disregarding convention so thoroughly?