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The Profound Impact of Jes Grew in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo: Within the Body, Dance, and Cultural Freedom

              Mumbo Jumbo, written by Ismael Reed, utilizes the aspect of dance to demonstrate how people can fight to preserve their culture. The avant-garde movement in the novel, Jes Grew, represents not just an illness, but also the opposite— a pulse of life, a burst of energy meant to be felt and shared. This rhythm serves to show the combination of joy, rhythm, and freedom all simultaneously through the same cause. However, Reed specifically uses this idea to show that the body is more than just a piece of flesh. Rather, he believed that it’s a medium which can be used to express who we are and our true origins. Through the combination of movement and music, people can remember what the world tries to censor and make them forget that culture survives within the individual. Reed describes dance as something that is meant to connect all human beings. In Chapter 17,  it reads “Dance in the universal art, the common joy of expression. Those...
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History is Always Repeating Itself

  E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime suggests that history does not move in a straight line but rather loops and repeats, as its title suggests, where the ragtime rhythm circles back on itself with variations. Issues like racial injustice, labor exploitation, and the glorification of wealth dominate the early 20th-century setting of the novel, but they feel just as relevant when Doctorow was writing in 1975, and even now in the 21st century. The book’s fragmented narrative style, constantly shifting between characters and events, reinforces this sense of history as disjointed and cyclical. Nothing feels resolved; instead, the struggles of one generation simply reemerge in the next.       Coalhouse Walker Jr.’s story best exemplifies this repetition in the book. His humiliation at the hands of Willie Conklin, as well as the other racist firemen, and his escalating demands for justice speak towards a larger American pattern. It highlights the grievances of the marginalized...
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