![]() ![]() It's a tribute to the strength of the panoply of FBI-targeted writers, intellectuals and leaders that they, for the most part, toughed it out and remain with us today as a fundamental part of the fabric of American history and letters." -Repps Hudson, St. Paints a sobering picture of state-sanctioned repression and harassment over decades. 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.'" - Publishers Weekly Edgar Hoover as a more complex figure than James Baldwin's telling description of him: as 'history's most highly paid (and most utterly useless) voyeur.'" -Douglas Field, Times Literary Supplement It makes an unexpected addition to studies of twentieth-century African American literature and succeeds in presenting J. Eyes is pitched at both academic and general readers. welcome model for seeing state interference in culture as a two-way street." - Los Angeles Review of Books " immensely important story about the black authors that we thought we knew, from the 'notorious negro revolutionary' Claude McKay to the Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez. Eyes is a groundbreaking account of a long-hidden dimension of African American literature. Illuminating both the serious harms of state surveillance and the ways in which imaginative writing can withstand and exploit it, F.B. 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. 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. 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. Maxwell reveals, FBI surveillance came to influence the creation and public reception of African American literature in the heart of the twentieth century. The official aim behind the Bureau’s close reading was to anticipate political unrest. By the time of Hoover’s death in 1972, these ghostreaders knew enough to simulate a sinister black literature of their own. 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. Eyes exposes the Bureau’s intimate policing of five decades of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels. Drawing on nearly 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, F.B. But behind the scenes the FBI’s hostility to black protest was energized by fear of and respect for black writing. Edgar Hoover’s white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. Few institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. ![]()
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