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.
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