SOURCE: Melnick, Jeffrey. “‘What You Lookin' At?’ Ishmael Reed's Reckless Eyeballing.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, pp. 298-311. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Melnick explores how Reed addresses gender and racial politics in Reckless Eyeballing.

Ishmael Reed—like Norman Mailer, another writer fond of boxing metaphors—seems to go out of his way to court controversy.¹ It is tempting to summarize Reed's career by presenting a kind of photographic negative image; one could learn much about Ishmael Reed by studying a random collection of quotations about him from his numerous enemies, rivals, and critics.²

Reed is an inveterate writer of letters to the editor, a peerless conspiracy theorist, and an individualist who consistently defies attempts to categorize him, although he has often been pushed unwillingly (if understandably) into a conservative...