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F.B. Eyes - How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Paperback)
Loot Price: R588
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F.B. Eyes - How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Paperback)
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List price R682
Loot Price R588
Discovery Miles 5 880
You Save R94 (14%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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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