All,
PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING CRUCIAL INFORMATION. THEN READ THIS NEW GROUNDBREAKING BOOK AND PASS THE WORD...
Kofi
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10321.html
F.B. Eyes:
How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J. Maxwell
Hardcover | 2015 | $29.95 / £19.95 | ISBN: 9780691130200
384 pp. | 6 x 9 |
PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING CRUCIAL INFORMATION. THEN READ THIS NEW GROUNDBREAKING BOOK AND PASS THE WORD...
Kofi
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10321.html
F.B. Eyes:
How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J. Maxwell
Hardcover | 2015 | $29.95 / £19.95 | ISBN: 9780691130200
384 pp. | 6 x 9 |
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.
William J. Maxwell is associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars and the editor of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems.
Endorsement:
"Anyone who spies William J. Maxwell's latest book is sure to have her or his eyes pop. F.B. Eyes is a fascinating study of the FBI's decades-long surveillance program targeting the who's who of the African American cultural scene. What we read as art, Hoover's G-Men coded as threats. In poring over black writers' output across the long arc of the civil rights struggle, the FBI's 'ghostreaders,' as diabolical as they were paranoid, added layers of weight to--and in some cases informed--the African American literary canon, which Maxwell reveals in an irresistible narrative steeped in investigative research."--Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
"F.B. Eyes is an exciting and important read: part detective story, part intelligence history, and part revisionist theory of black modernism. Throughout, William J. Maxwell proves to be a more rigorous and ingenious 'ghostreader' than Hoover ever was."--Mary Helen Washington, University of Maryland, College Park
"In this meticulously researched study, William J. Maxwell demonstrates how the luminaries of twentieth-century African American literature preoccupied the 'ghostreaders' of Hoover's FBI, who became some of the most assiduous critics of modern black writing. While making clear the abuses of FBI surveillance, Maxwell also illuminates the fascinating ways in which African American authors incorporated a critical awareness of spying into much of the literature they produced."--Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago
"Full of surprises of fact and interpretation, often wittily and memorably formulated, this awe-inspiringly well-researched book offers a completely new approach to FBI spying on black writers and to the readerly and scholarly habits of Hoover’s G-Men, who perversely come across as rather pioneering critics of African American literature. This book is an absolute delight to read."--Werner Sollors, Harvard University
More Endorsements
Table of Contents
Subject Areas:
American History
American Literature
Comparative Literature
The F.B. Eyes Digital Archive presents high-quality copies of forty-nine of the FBI files discussed in this book: http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes/.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-691-13020-0
F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J Maxwell
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 [was] an institution tightly knit (not consensually) to African-American literature.” (Jan.)
http://chicagohumanities.org/events/2014/journeys/the-fbi-as-literary-critic
F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature
by William J Maxwell
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 [was] an institution tightly knit (not consensually) to African-American literature.” (Jan.)
http://chicagohumanities.org/events/2014/journeys/the-fbi-as-literary-critic
"The FBI as Literary Critic":
WILLIAM J. MAXWELL SPEAKS AT CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL OCTOBER 26, 2014 ON THE ROLE OF THE FBI IN SPYING ON AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS FROM 1919-1972
Journeys
Chicago Humanities Festival
The FBI as Literary Critic
VIDEO: William J. Maxwell
Perhaps the most surprising of J. Edgar Hoover’s many obsessions was
his interest in African American writing. Beginning with the Harlem
Renaissance, Hoover and his G-men tried to anticipate political unrest
through close readings and interpretations of such authors as Claude
McKay, Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez, among many others. Washington
University professor William J. Maxwell uncovers this long-hidden
chapter in the history of American surveillance and American literature.
This program is presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.
Image by Annie Dipert
Speakers and Performers
William J. Maxwell
William J. Maxwell is associate professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. An authority on the intersection of African American literature and American political history, he is the author of the award-winning book New Negro, Old Left: African American Writing and Communism between the Wars. His latest book, F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature, based on 14,000 pages of newly released FBI files, will be published by Princeton University Press in January 2015.
CHF Suggests
Related links and resources for further study
Leaders And Thinkers
William J. Maxwell
Faculty page at Washington University in St. Louis
Good Reads
Total Literary Awareness: How the FBI Pre-read African American Writing
Online Resources
FB Eyes [podcast]
This program is presented in partnership with the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.
This program was recorded on October 26, 2014 as part of the 25th Anniversary Chicago Humanities Festival, Journeys: http://chf.to/2014Journeys
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