SOURCE: Ludwig, Sämi. “Dialogic Possession in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo: Bakhtin, Voodoo, and the Materiality of Multicultural Discourse.” In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich, pp. 325-36. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Ludwig investigates the relationship between M. M. Bakhtin's theory of language and Reed's “Neo-HooDoo aesthetic,” focusing on the concepts of possession and the voodoo priest in Mumbo Jumbo.

Languages quarreled with each other, but this quarrel—like any quarrel among great and significant cultural and historical forces—could not pass on to a further phase by means of abstract and rational dialogue, not by a purely dramatic dialogue, but only by means of complexly dialogized hybrids.

It is necessary to come to terms with discourse as a reified, “typical” but at the same time intentional phenomenon.

—M. M. Bakhtin...