The format and typography of Mumbo Jumbo are unique and make allusion to several typographic and stylistic conventions not normally associated with novels. The text begins and ends as if it were a movie script, with credits, a fade-in, and a freeze-frame followed by the publication and title pages which occur after chapter one. This is followed by a closing section that mimics a scholarly book on social history or folk magic by citing a lengthy bibliography. In addition, the tale is illustrated with drawings, photographs, and collages, some of which relate to the text, some of which look like illustrations from a social-studies book on African-American history, and some of which seem to be included as a cryptic protest against the Vietnam War.
Reed uses various conspicuous devices that remind readers of his presence as the author, such as brief parenthetical commentaries signed "I.R."[3] and footnotes to books published after the action of the story, such as Castles in the Air,[4] a 1958 memoir by Irene Castle. Reed is also credited for the photograph on the first and some later editions of the novel, in which symmetrical images of a nude dark-skinned woman with greased down hair are transposed over a blown-up rose.[5]
Mumbo Jumbo both depends on and fosters the disorientation of the reader. Rather than stick to any semblance of a novel's conventions, Reed supplies us with a hodgepodge of hand-written letters, radio dispatches, photographs, various typefaces, drawings, and even footnotes. With the first and second chapters interrupted by copyright and title pages, we even get the sense we're looking at a cinematic title screen. This is all to say that Reed is constantly blurring the lines of those things traditionally understood as distinct—in this case, form. In this vein he seems adamant to defamiliarize the familiar.
