Mvuyekure, Pierre-Damien

Dr. Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure is Professor of English and African-American Literature in the Department of English Language and Literature and the 2005 Philip G. Hubbard Outstanding Educator at the University of Northern Iowa. A Fulbright alumnus, he received his Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Dr. Mvuyekure specializes in African and African Diaspora Literatures, Post-Colonial Literature and Theory, Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature, and Cultural Theory and has authored numerous articles and book chapters on these subjects. His most recent publications include Lamentations on the Rwandan Genocide (Final Thursday Press, 2006) and World Eras Volume 10: West African Kingdoms, 500-1590 (Gale/Thompson, 2004).

“ Dark Heathenism” of the American Novelist Ishmael Reed

2007 0-7734-5440-3
This book posits that Neo-HooDooism, an African Voodoo-derived aesthetic, evinces Ishmael Reed’s post-colonial transformation of the English language, colonialist discourses, and imperial cultural systems into discourses of self-empowerment and self-representation. As Reed’s return to ‘dark heathenism,” Neo-HooDooism represents an attempt to rediscover pre-slavery and pre-colonial African languages and oral traditions to remedy the impact of physical and linguistic displacement that African-Americans continue to experience in the United States. Reed’s nine novels are post-colonial writings whose production affects social, cultural, political, and historical contexts from African-American, American multi-ethnic, Caribbean, African, “Third-World,” and global perspectives. This book analyzes Neo-HooDooism as a post-colonial discourse/literary theory and a multi-cultural poetics through which Reed reconnects the African Diaspora to Africa within a global perspective. To accomplish this, an investigation is made into slavery, hegemony, language, place and displacement, race, gender, feminism, writing, post-coloniality, and theory as post-colonial themes that permeate Reed’s nine novels.