Ishmael Reed

Ishmael Reed's parody of slave narratives—the classical literature of the African American tradition—which redefined the neo-slave genre and launched a lucrative academic industry
Some parodies are as necessary as the books they answer. Such is the case with Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed's scathing, offbeat response to conventional anti-slavery novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Though Flight to Canada has...

The Civil War divides the United States. Millions, including the president, wish to maintain monuments to generals like Robert E. Lee. Referred to as "Knights" in Gone with the Wind," some generals earned their bona fides by murdering blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans During the Battle of Chapultepec in 1847, Robert E. Lee fought children, Los niños heroes. Refusing to surrender, they were slaughtered. Ishmael Reed's reach is vast and varied....

Ishmael Reed goes too far, again! Just as the fugitive slaves went to Canada and challenged the prevailing view that slaves were well off under their masters, Ishmael Reed has gone all the way to Quebec-where this book is published-to challenge the widespread opinion that racism is no longer a factor in American life. In some ways, says Reed, the United States very much resembles the country of the 1850s. The representations of blacks in popular...

More than a biography and 'bigger than boxing', The Complete Muhammad Ali is a fascinating portrait of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Ishmael Reed calls it The Complete Muhammad Ali because most of the hundred odd books about the Champion are "either too adoring or make excessively negative assertions." They also omit many voices that deserve to be heard. Ishmael Reed charts Muhammad Ali's evolution from Black Nationalism...

When Ishmael Reed wrote The Terrible Twos about the American infantile need for instant gratification, he could not have realized that in June 2020, journalist Nicole Wallace would be referring to a president as a "toddler." Reed had parodied other genres, the gothic novel, the detective novel, the western and the neo-slave narrative, a term that he coined in 1984, and which began a big academic payroll as it was included in syllabi nation-wide. From...

"The poems in this new collection from Ishmael Reed were written between 2007 and 2020. They range from poems based on events that occurred around Reed's house to cataclysmic space events. Some of the poems were commissioned. "Moving Richmond" was part of a public art installation created by Mildred Howard. The poem, in huge letters forged into weathering steel billboards greets passengers who enter the new Bay Area mass transit hub in Richmond, California....

“Up from Slavery” is the 1901 autobiography of American educator Booker T. Washington (1856—1915). The book describes his experience of working to rise up from being enslaved as a child during the Civil War, the obstacles he overcame to get an education at the new Hampton Institute, and his work establishing vocational schools like the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to help Black people and other persecuted people of color learn useful, marketable...