F.B. Eyes : How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature / William J. Maxwell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maxwell, William J., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation--History--20th century.

American literature--African American authors--20th century.

American literature--African American authors--History and criticism.

American 4:--1900-present.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (385 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. Eyes exposes the Bureau's intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Starting in 1919, year one of Harlem's renaissance and Hoover's career at the Bureau, secretive FBI "ghost readers" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover's death in 1972, these ghost readers knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. The official aim behind the Bureau's close reading was to anticipate political unrest. Yet, as William J. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. Taking his title from Richard Wright's poem "The FB Eye Blues," Maxwell details how the FBI threatened the international travels of African American writers and prepared to jail dozens of them in times of national emergency. All the same, he shows that the Bureau's paranoid style could prompt insightful criticism from Hoover's ghost readers and creative replies from their literary targets. For authors such as Claude McKay, James Baldwin, and Sonia Sanchez, the suspicion that government spy-critics tracked their every word inspired rewarding stylistic experiments as well as disabling self-censorship. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One/Thesis One. The Birth of the Bureau, Coupled with the Birth of J. Edgar Hoover, Ensured the FBI's Attention to African American Literature

Part Two/Thesis Two. The FBI's Aggressive Filing and Long Study of African American Writers Was Tightly Bound to the Agency's Successful Evolution under Hoover

Part Three/Thesis Three. The FBI Is Perhaps the Most Dedicated and Influential Forgotten Critic of African American Literature

Part Four/Thesis Four. The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Century Black Atlantic, Both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows

Part Five/Thesis Five. Consciousness of FBI Ghost reading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature

Appendix: FOIA Requests for FBI Files on African American Authors Active from 1919 to 1972

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Credits:

Cover art © James Wechsler, Freedom of Information: Paul Robeson, 3.124, 2006. Acrylic and India ink on paper, 28″ × 20.″ Cover design by Pamela Schnitter.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-341) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691173412

0691173419

9781400852062

1400852064

OCLC:

896700412