Some say it's essential to understand the western canon. I think it's probably important from the American perspectives, but probably won't be too informative for anybody else. Is it essential?
>>25218470It's a good novel and definitely worth reading if you're interested in either postmodern fiction or African-American fiction that's actually high quality. I have no clue where you're getting the idea that it's essential to understanding the Western canon.
>>25218470It's worth less than a used condom. Magic realism, whether I like it or not, belongs to spics.
>>25218470How important is the black schizophrenic ramblings lauding jazz as the essence of life? Yeah, pretty important to the Burger, not so much for any society that doesn't worship negros.
>>25218492Harold Bloom put it on list of top books in the western canon.
>>25218509Yeah, nothing about that list matters at all
>>25218509>believe everything a hack critic says, goy!
>>25218517what does goy mean?
>>25218500all the musical geniuses in the world play jazz right now. i think the burgers may have gotten it right with that one
>>25218522>the unchosen ones
It's actually fun to read. I do wonder why it is way less known or promoted compared to slogs like Native Son, and it's probably just too weird and too concerned with subjects like Haitian voodoo to be seen as an 'American' anything.
>>25218527Herman Hesse was right when he said jazz is the music of a civilisation in decline.
>>25218470>Some sayLiterally just a few terminally online dorks who spam TrueLit and Lawton’s tweets
>>25218470>called Mumbo Jumbo>book is a load of mumbo jumboWho writes this shit?
>>25218635I think you've basically hit it on the head. In many ways the novel isn't about African Americans or African American culture. It positions what makes African American culture great as being something that isn't inherently to them but something that has been present since at least ancient Egypt. This might seem like it would appeal to the Hotep types, but the novel goes out of it way to say that anybody can get jes grew too, white people can even be carriers of jes grew in the case of Warren Harding. There's also how he makes fun of black Islamic movements with the character Abdul Sufi Hamid which furthers him from any Hotep. and while Mumbo Jumbo does go out of it's way to show that there is probably some use-cases and benefits of Christianity in the black community like with how the young boy is saved by his preacher father from becoming the Talking Android, requiring Von Vampton and Safecracker to do black face, but Reed is far too critical of Christianity and religion in general to be appealing towards to black church going crowd. Like you said, Mumbo Jumbo is also not a boring, awful and hand wringing book about slavery so white people were never going to be it's biggest proponents. Add on to all that the fact of how crass and transgressive it can be and that leaves Mumbo Jumbo, and Reed in general, to only really have an audience with people who are interested in interesting writing, witch is very few. He's a writers writer. Pynchon and Tupac gave him shout-outs so there will probably always be intellectual shut-ins who pick up his stuff and like it, but you'll probably never walk into a classroom and find the students talking about the gams on those sultry floozies or whtvr. Reed's poetry is studied more often and it will probably always be that way. Also his critics of Hamilton are probably some of the stuff he's most popular for and some gen z women and old losers into Broadway will probably never forgive him for that.
>>25218645I honestly don't think Mumbo Jumbo is talked about basically anywhere online. It shows up a few times here but outside of that nobody really cares. I've seen discussion on twitter about how Toni Morrison helped produced his satire of Lin Manuel Miranda and they don't even mention the name of the play let alone Reed. If anyone online likes him it's the anti-Hamilton crowd but even those few just pretend to have read the play. Even the people who praise post-modern door stoppers don't talk about Reed. Whether that's because his books aren't big enough or because they don't really fw black dudes is yet to be seen.
>>25218470/lit/'s a black board now, crackers. Go get your pasty ass back to /pol/.
