Blackness as Infectious: Plagues and Anti-Plagues in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo

With the outbreak of Covid-19, the virus has made a second ‘pandemic’ spreading worldwide increasingly visible, that of racial discrimination, leading to higher mortality rates among people of color and unequal access to healthcare on racial grounds, along with pervasive phenomena of xenophobia and hate crimes. In such times that many critics have already called science fictional, the genre of science fiction can contribute to shedding light on the relation between fears of contagious diseases, and notions of race and racism. Within numerous works of science fiction, and in particular within what Priscilla Wald has called ‘outbreak narratives,’ a common and problematic narrative trope establishes a connection between infectious diseases plaguing societies and fears of racial contamination, where black people are perceived as the main culprits of contagion. In this light, the paper aims to contrast this widespread trope with an Afrofuturist text that manages to turn this narrative on its head. Indeed, in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), the infectious Jes Grew is seen not as a plague, but rather as an anti-plague, one that represents a tool of resistance and affirmation for African Americans against the attempts of a white supremacist group to marginalize African American communities and to stop the spreading of this life-affirming, dance-inducing ‘virus.’ Jes Grew, then, informs us of the fundamental role and power of collective action and movements, such as the Black Lives Matter one, to spread ‘virally’ in order to fight for social and racial justice.