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Fighting the Wrongheaded Doppelgänger

In Ishmael Reed’s work, the Black Arts movement’s drive for cultural self-determination manifests itself as a matter of representational politics. This paper argues that there is a striking consistency in Reed’s vision, from his early fiction to his latest essays, in his continuous efforts to free the image of African Americans from racist appropriations. This manifests itself both in
his playful satire and in his angry footnoted prose. Special attention is given to doubling and the appropriation of one’s image (“etheric double”) by powerful outside forces—an issue which connects media, power, money, and Neo-HooDoo conjuring.
Reed’s transition from celebrated postmodern “fabulator” to iconoclastic opinionator at the same time invites a criticism of postmodern philosophy and its formalist celebration of negativity, which is exposed as autistic in its disempowering denial of referentiality and experiential reality.