THE RETURN OF THE DEAD: POSTMODERNIST POLITICS OF RE-VISIONISM AND AFRICAN/AMERICAN HISTORY OF DIFFERENCE IN ISHMAEL REED’S FLIGHT TO CANADA
Keywords:
NeoHoodoo, rewriting of African American history, postmodernist strategies, distortion of slave narrative genre, political and cultural emancipation of African Americans, past in the presentAbstract
In Flight to Canada the author exploits a particular African American form of rewriting – Signifyin (g) - and a postmodernist distortion of the slave narrative genre in the attempt to write a revisionist history of one of the most important historical events in African American history, the Civil War. He combines certain aspects of NeoHooDooism, Reed’s literary method based on African American oral tradition of folk tales and religious practices such as Voodoo, with a wide range of postmodernist strategies. This is how he manages to make us feel the past in the present and, at the same time, to underscore a hidden political agenda and his concern with a true meaning of political and cultural emancipation of African Americans in the past as well as in the 1960s. Tied with a (postmodernist) need to question the real nature of the world we all live in, Reed’s novel opens up some new horizons and sheds light on both African American and our own history.
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