Africanisms, race relations, and diasporic identities in 'Mules and Men', 'Go Tell It On The Mountain', and 'Mumbo Jumbo' (Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed)

The studies of the African elements in twentieth-century African-American fail to compare the patterns in the narratives with their analogues in particular cultures from the continent. Melville J. Herskovits, William D. Piersen, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., are among the few scholars who have successfully compared African patterns in African-American literature with their parallels in African societies. Drawing from the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary methods that these scholars have developed, this dissertation will compare the folktales, sermons, worldviews, and rhetorical strategies in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935), James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972) with their equivalents in specific West African and European-American cultures.; Using Paul Gilroy's theory in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness that “modern” Black cultures are hybrid, transnational, and discontinuous formations (4), this study will also discuss the ways in which Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Ishmael Reed have represented their relationships with the other Blacks in the Diaspora and those in Africa.; This dissertation is interdisciplinary since it draws from the works of American and African writers, literary critics, historians, and folklorists in order to understand a segment of twentieth-century African-American literature that has been neglected. In order to uncover the African elements in this literature, one needs an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and comparative method that transcends geographic and linguistic barriers.