Quest for Racial Equality: A Subaltern perspective in the select novels of Ishmael Reed

Abstract

Ishmael Reed is an African American writer. He questions the colonists' imposed conventional accounts of history, culture, and identity. His novels range from the eighteenth century to the present, combining historical events, cowboy myths with modern technology and cultural clutter. He offers alternative perspectives that empower the subalterns, who are the people of color, the poor, the women, and the indigenous. Subalternity is a theme that he explores through various characters, settings, and genres. Subaltern is promoted through colonial palimpsestic practices overwhelming the history of the colonised and ex-colonised nations. His fictions vividly portray the particular social condition of black Americans and describes about VooDoo which in turn became HooDoo, a syncretic religion, in his novels. He argues that VooDoo lies as the base for all religions and its aesthetics as an embodiment of age-old Culture. It undertakes to challenge preconceived absolutes and media-based realities regarding race, religion, and indigenous cultures by reviving the resourcefulness of African American heritage. His novels project the traces of slavery and history of the African American people. The plight of those people leads to subalternity which is nothing but a manifested form, a coterminous practice, called slavery. It witnesses dominance of colonialism. This paper attempts to bring out Quest for Racial Equality: A Subaltern perspective in the select novels of Ishmael Reed.