SOURCE: Hume, Kathryn. “Ishmael Reed and the Problematics of Control.” PMLA 108, no. 3 (May 1993): 506-18.

In the following essay, Hume examines Reed's treatment of control and power in his fiction and places him within the context of other writers dealing with similar thematic concerns.

Spiked on meat hooks in Emperor Franz Joseph Park, Bukka Doopeyduk dies slowly, his agonies overshadowed by the hoopla of public demonstrations attending his execution. Like Damiens, the regicide whose torments are narrated in the first pages of Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Bukka suffers while the state inscribes its Kafkaesque discourse of power on his body. The message of this Foucauldian end? The protagonist of Ishmael Reed's Free-Lance Pallbearers is meat, and the country a shambles. Bukka is to be eaten by HARRY SAM, otherwise known as the good old US of A; he is fuel for SAM's governmental machine. His being consumed is what...