anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss refers to in The Savage Mind (1962) as “bricolage” and
which Reed famously defined in his 1970 literary manifesto as Neo-Hoodooism. Often cited as a
defining trait of postmodernist fiction, bricolage is the practice of using whatever is at hand--in
Reed’s case seemingly any facet of U.S. or global culture--and putting them together to create a
new cultural (literary) artifact. According to Levi-Strauss, the practitioner of this process, the
“bricoleur,” embodies the “savage mind,” one who cleverly and cobbles together pre-existing
things to improvise something new and unique. While Levi-Strauss’s concept does suggest the
convoluted amalgamation of cultural influences in The Terrible Twos, in his 1970 “Neo-Hoodoo
Manifesto” Reed formulated his own “postmodernist” aesthetic, rooted not in French structuralist
theory, but rather in the history and culture of the African Caribbean. Neo-Hoodooism de-centers
European and U.S. literary and cultural histories by foregrounding the syncretic cultures of
African Caribbean, a “contact zone” which Reed identifies with spirits (loas), magic, nature,
music, history, freedom and creativity.
Just as Alejo Carpentier, in his 1949 literary manifesto “On the Marvelous Real in America,”
rejects European surrealism in favor of the organic “magical reality” of the African Caribbean,
Reed’s aesthetic highlights the reified and monolithic nature of Euro-centric U.S. cultural
traditions. But Reed, again much like Carpentier, does not simplistically reject European and
Euro-American cultural traditions; rather, he “calls for the creation of a new cultural field at once
appropriative and multivocal and constantly in flux.” 4 While Neo-Hoodoo emerged at the
“confluence of African-Haitian vodoun and the music and dance of slave culture,” Reed
envisions it in 1970 as a cultural movement through which new artist-priests “are building our
own American ‘pantheon’” or “loas (Spirits)” from the resources of all people, not just African
Americans. 5 In The Terrible Twos, the character Black Peter, an African American street
performer who joins the Nicholites, embodies this syncretic, multicultural and historically-
informed ethos. The is character is based on a Moorish assistant to St. Nicholas first introduced
to the St. Nicholas legend in the mid-nineteenth century. The original Black Peter was drawn
from earlier versions of the St. Nicholas legend which alluded to a companion, possibly the
Devil as slave, who accompanied Nicholas. Although Black Peter still plays a prominent role
4
Mielke, 4. This essay provides an illuminating examination of the Neo-Hoodoo aesthetic in relation to women
characters in Reed’s novel Flight to Canada (1976).
5
Mielke, 4.
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