بازروایی هویت از طریق تاریخ: خوانش پساساختارگرایانه‌ی‌ رمان مامبو جامبو اثر ایشمائیل رید

The postmodern philosophy offers a new outlook at defining history as a discipline in the humanities while focusing on its ontology through challenging the fundamental presuppositions of the Enlightenment and modernist approaches to history. An illuminating example of this approach is observed in the work of the American philosopher of history, Hayden White. By proposing the historical sublime, White challenged the rudimentary assumptions of the Enlightenment/modernist philosophies of history to render them ineffectual and insufficient. In parallel with the development of the poststructuralist philosophy of history, historiographic meta-fiction burgeoned to criticize the traditional approaches to history by intermingling the historical and the fictional, and through the deployment of narratological techniques of its own. In the preset article, attempt is made to closely read Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo in order to investigate the strategies and novelistic techniques by the help of which he embraced such postmodernist tenets. The present study further provides a comparative study of the major approaches to history, namely, the Enlightenment/modernist on the one hand and the postmodernist on the other. It is thus intended to read the novel in terms of White’s key critical terms on history to explore Reed’s objectives in deconstructing the fundamental conventions of historiography and the classical historical novel