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Jes Grew and Cultural Appropriation

  Jes Grew is an amorphous idea that plays a key role in Ishmael Reed’s book Mumbo Jumbo . I interpreted its modern variation as the emergence and infiltration of non-white non-Christian forms of expression into the mainstream. One of the first examples we are given of Jes Grew is Jazz. Jazz originated in New Orleans, a city with a large black population. New Orleans also importantly has practitioners of voodoo. Voodoo contrasts with the monotheistic beliefs of Atonists with followers of voodoo believing in many different Loas for individual purposes. Mumbo Jumbo also attacks the notion of keeping other people’s culturally significant artifacts in museums. This idea manifests itself with the Mu’tafikah who steal back from “private collections of Europe and America” (Reed 63). The popularization of alternative practices and backlash against current systems alarms the Atonists in the Wallflower Order, so they begin a plan to exterminate Jes Grew.  Mambo Jumbo deconstructs Euroce...
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The Upper Class in Ragtime

  Ragtime written by Doctorow E.L. Doctorow explores the almost forgotten time period of the early 1900s. From the various threads present throughout the storym one thing remains constant: the rich being presented with irony. Doctorow shows the United States being in an interesting state where the rich “honor the poor” (Doctorow 34). The narrator describes how the rich decorate their poverty balls to look like the mines. They participate in these poverty balls to raise money for the poor, yet at the same time they need poor people to live in bad conditions to continue this form of entertainment. The tone of the passage shows the irony such as the way Doctorow writes about how the “bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys” and then ends this vivid description with “the proceeds were for charity” (35). While the tone doesn’t imply any sort of bias towards the descriptions, the way Doctorow ends the descriptions of the rich pretending to be poor with “the proceeds were f...
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