Ishmael Reed is one of America's leading proponents of multiculturalism. His commitment to the transformation of America into a truly multicultural society has informed his writing and has also been evident in his energetic activity as editor, publisher, and cultural entrepreneur. As a satirist he has been compared to not only William S. Burroughs but also Jonathan Swift. Characteristically, Reed counters such comparisons with the assertion that there is an African or Afro-American tradition within which his writing can more accurately be placed, and of which his critics are woefully ignorant. Similarly, he views the tendency to place his work conveniently in the company of white postmodernists as evidence of the narrowness of critics' terms of reference. In a 1988 interview with Shamoon Zamir that was collected in Conversations with Ishmael Reed (1995), Reed returned to a point he had made regularly before: "I think that avant-garde movements tend to...