Transatlantic conjuring: Ishmael Reed and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

This paper discusses many striking parallels in the fiction of the African American writer Ishmael Reed and the African writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, suggesting that they are in conversation with each other and, beyond that, possibly even manifest aesthetic similarities of a particular transatlantic cultural sensibility. Rather than applying an established toolbox of current Western academic criticism, this comparison relies on the presentation of surprising rhetorical attitudes and devices that the two authors have in common – in particular, notions of animism that show specific interactional patterns in narratology, plotting, and stylistic means. If we compare these patterns with dominant twentieth-century theories of discourse, they seem more compatible with the pre-Modernist values of a Pragmatist worldview than poststructuralism in their way of approaching our understanding of agency, language power, and pluralism.