On Neo-HooDooism Of Ishmael Reed’s Japanese By Spring

As one of the most representative contemporary African American writers,Ishmael Reed was praised for his "Neo-HooDoo" aesthetic thought.Neo-HooDooism is based on voodoo mythology and summarizes specific religious concepts into artistic writing methods.It reconstructs cultural traditions and liberates art imagination through syncretism,synchronization,and multiculturalism in the field of literature.Japanese by Spring is a novel published by Reed in the 1990s.It uses the American culture wars and the rise of Japanese economic power in the 1980s and 1990s as creative backgrounds,telling the ups and downs of a black professor in pursuing a tenure.So far,there have been few studies on novels from the perspective of Neo-HooDoo,and there is room for exploration and analysis of Reed’s Neo-HooDoo writing thoughts during this period.This thesis uses syncretism,synchronization,and multiculturalism,which are associated with Neo-HooDoo,to examine the syncretism of the novel through the fusion of texts,the synchronization through the combination of fiction and reality,as well as the multiculturalism through the juxtaposition of multiple languages and cultural backgrounds,finding that Reed highlights the importance of returning to African culture through the protagonist Puttbutt’s ultimate futility,demonstrates the vitality and tolerance of African-American culture represented by Yoruba culture through the positive transformation of Professor Crabtree,and expresses an expectation for multicultural America through the persistence of multiculturalism by Ishmael Reed,a trans-boundary figure.