F.B. Eyes
How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
How FBI surveillance influenced African American writing
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 "ghostreaders" monitored the latest developments in African American letters. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders 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 ghostreaders 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At 1,884 pages, James Baldwin's FBI file is the fattest among the "51 files on individual African-American authors and critics active during the Hoover years, 1919 to 1972" scrutinized in this bold, provocative study. Maxwell (New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars) uses the documents to probe the FBI's "institutionalized fascination" with black authors like Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Other writers treated here in depth include Claude McKay ("the earliest Afro-modernist author to impress his way into his own FBI file"), Richard Wright, John Williams, and Lorraine Hansberry, but going by this account, few, if any, working African-American writers entirely slipped past the FBI's gaze during Hoover's tenure. Maxwell weaves a complex narrative tapestry, incorporating the life stories of both Hoover and the FBI, as well as WWII-era harassment of the black press, the impact of McCarthyism, and the "utility of New Critical close reading" to FBI agents required to practice an unlikely kind of literary criticism in the pursuit of "subversives." Scholars will find this densely written work a powerful take on African-American literature. Maxwell's passion for the subject spills onto every page of his detailed, persuasive documentation that "the FBI an institution tightly knit (not consensually) to African-American literature."
