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  2. F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

William J. Maxwell 2014 © Princeton University Press
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ISBN(s)
  • 9780691130200 (hardcover)
  • 9781400852062 (ebook)
  • 9780691173412 (paper)
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  • Table of Contents

  • Stats

  • Cover Page
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Dedication Page
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
    • The FBI against and for African American Literature
    • The Files and the FOIA
    • Five Theses and the Way Forward
  • 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
    • The Bureau before Hoover
    • Hoover before the Bureau
    • Bureau of Letters: Lit.-Cop Federalism, the Hoover Raids, and the Harlem Renaissance
  • 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
    • Flatfoot Montage: The Genre of the Counterliterary FBI File
    • The Counterliterary State and the Charismatic Bureaucracy: Trimming the First Amendment, Fencing the Harlem Renaissance
    • Persons to Racial Conditions: Literary G-Men and FBI Counterliterature from the New Deal to the Second World War
    • Afro-Loyalty and Custodial Detention: Files of World War II
    • Total Literary Awareness: Files of the Cold War
    • COINTELPRO Minstrelsy: Files of Black Power
  • Part Three/Thesis Three: The FBI Is Perhaps the Most Dedicated and Influential Forgotten Critic of African American Literature
    • Reading Like a CIA Agent
    • Reading Like an FBI Agent
    • Critics behind the Bureau Curtain: Meet Robert Adger Bowen and William C. Sullivan
    • Ask Dr. Hoover: Model Citizen Criticism and the FBI’s Interpretive Oracle
  • Part Four/Thesis Four: The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Century Black Atlantic, Both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows
    • The State in the Nation-State; the State of the Transnational Turn
    • The State of Black Transnationalism; the State in the Black Atlantic
    • Checking Diasporan ID: Hostile Translation and the Passport Office
    • State-Sponsored Transnationalism: The Stop Notice and the Travel Bureau
    • Jazz Ambassadors versus Literary Escapees
  • Part Five/Thesis Five: Consciousness of FBI Ghostreading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature
    • Reading Ghostreading in the Harlem Renaissance: New Negro Journalists and Claude McKay
    • Invisible G-Men En Route to the Cold War: George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison
    • Mysteries and Antifiles of Black Paris: Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes
    • Black Arts Antifiles and the “Hoover Poem”: John A. Williams, James Baldwin, Sam Greenlee, Melvin Van Peebles, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez
    • Bureau Writing after Hoover: Dudley Randall, Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor
  • Appendix: FOIA Requests for FBI Files on African American Authors Active from 1919 to 1972
  • Notes
  • Works Cited
  • Index
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