| Name: |
Ishmael Reed |
| Variant Name: |
|
| Birth Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Ethnicity: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
Ishmael Reed is one of America's leading proponents of multiculturalism. His commitment to the transformation of America into a truly multicultural society has informed his writing and has also been evident in his energetic activity as editor, publisher, and cultural entrepreneur. As a satirist he has been compared to not only William S. Burroughs but also Jonathan Swift. Characteristically, Reed counters such comparisons with the assertion that there is an African or Afro-American tradition within which his writing can more accurately be placed, and of which his critics are woefully ignorant. Similarly, he views the tendency to place his work conveniently in the company of white postmodernists as evidence of the narrowness of critics' terms of reference. In a 1988 interview with Shamoon Zamir that was collected in Conversations with Ishmael Reed (1995), Reed returned to a point he had made regularly before: "I think that avant-garde movements tend to take themselves too seriously and believe that they are originating forms which are, in fact, ancient."
In a 1971 interview published in The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers (1974) John O'Brien described Reed as a writer who had been "planting bombs in our imaginations, disrupting our sense of what a novel should be as well as our belief about what America is." This striking image of Reed as terrorist of the imagination, subverting expectations of both literary form and cultural orthodoxies, remains appropriate nearly a quarter of a century later, although his approach to literary form has grown less disruptive.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 8,389 words (approx. 28 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Ishmael Reed Access Pass.
