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• W2327542797 abstract "Previous article FreeBook ReviewF. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. William J. Maxwell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. x+367.Alan M. WaldAlan M. WaldUniversity of Michigan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn his wickedly amusing F. B. Eyes, William J. Maxwell, professor of English literature at Washington University, steps into the darkly devious world of what he wryly christens US government “ghostreaders” (5). These were the men (exclusively) employed by J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to police African American literature from 1919 to 1972. During these five decades, the ghostreaders’ assignment was to search for signs of impending political unrest in the writing and activities of what Maxwell deems “Afro-Modernists” (5). These were black poets, fiction writers, and dramatists suspected by Hoover of radical (usually pro-Communist) political associations who “worked to modernize racial representation beginning with the Harlem Renaissance” (5). In a few instances, the upshot was the federal government’s curtailing of international travel by the targets of the investigations, but the literary impact was mostly to encourage writers to self-censorship as well to some inventive strategies of communication in their imaginative writing.Part of the genius of this book, with its title taken from a poem by Richard Wright, the author of Native Son (1940), stems from the novelty of the investigation Maxwell undertook into fourteen thousand pages of FBI materials. This archive arrived in the form of about fifty files of personal surveillance, and many of us would find reading even a fraction of this heavily redacted and redundant material to be tough going. Yet Maxwell figured out how to sift through the detritus for the telling detail to make a case that the ghostreadings were often surprisingly close, a strange blend of critical insight and paranoia. Such interpretative dexterity on Maxwell’s part combines with his fluency on a wide range of related subjects—FBI personalities, black American expatriates in Paris, coterminous trends in literary criticism, creative writing rejoining the presence of government spying—to yield a beguiling narrative bolstered by a solidly researched stream of information.In a complex and multilayered survey organized around five bold theses that are the arguments of the book’s five thick parts, Maxwell documents how the FBI influenced the creation and public reception of modern black literature. He starts with two parts demonstrating that the focus on black literature was a result of Hoover’s personal obsessions and the circumstances of the FBI’s birth (pt. 1), along with the bureau’s evolution for decades under his guidance (pt. 2). The arguments of the last two parts are announced by their respective theses/titles: “The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Cenutry Black Atlantic, both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows” (pt. 4) and “Consciousness of FBI Ghostreading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature” (pt. 5). Maxwell argues that Hoover, although probably a demented wacko, was no all-powerful puppet master pulling the strings and that the role of “ghostreading”—and what Maxwell calls the FBI’s “Total Literary Awareness” program (100)—can be properly understood only in terms of a dialogue among various elements of the conflict.These are challenging assertions, and the fun of F. B. Eyes is that it is a book oscillating between the charmingly precocious and the chillingly scary. For example, Maxwell observes that half the writers pursued by the FBI are ones included in the canonical Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1st ed., 1996) and then notes that twenty-seven of these were on the FBI “Custodial Detention” index, to be imprisoned in concentration camps in case of national emergency. He concludes, “It is not just an academic matter that U.S. state intelligence essentially arranged to jail the African American literary tradition at mid-century” (61). In the end, however, Maxwell does not seem exceptionally invested in demonstrating that this FBI surveillance, despite its clumsiness, was part of an interlocking system that tacitly or explicitly fueled the blacklisting, social discrimination, and violence of these five decades. The anti-Communist Peekskill Riots are never mentioned (despite Paul Robeson’s role in the narrative), and any connection of political labeling (part of the bureau’s surveillance of the writers) to the “emblematic sin of blacklisting” (98) is cited only once. More intellectual energy goes toward showing parallels between FBI reading strategies and the hermeneutic schools of the New Criticism, Yale-school deconstruction, and even Marxism (pt. 3)—producing some good laughs but not leading to much more.Black literary Communism is surely a subtext of this topic, but F. B. Eyes is not intended to be a book on everything you always wanted to know about black American writers and the Communist Party but didn’t have the data to ask. Even after reading Maxwell, the closet of Communist political identity for US writers in the mid-twentieth century remains a huge source of secrecy. In regard to actual beliefs of the various black writers who are the subject of decades of investigation, what one finds is more suggestive than definitive. Of course, there exist excellent biographies of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and a few others, but for most of the fifty subjects we learn nothing substantial about the nature and depth of their convictions. Were FBI suspicions about Communist links justified? And what did socialist convictions mean for imaginative work? Maxwell’s claims are intricately argued and always cleverly insightful, but he doesn’t “break news” with scandalous exposés: the subtlety of his discernments about reciprocal relations between FBI ghostreaders and Afro-Modernists is the news. To be sure, he produces some revelations of skulduggery in high office, but much of the power of the book is that it is just mordantly funny in what has become Maxwell’s signature style: “The FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature” (131).Such an equalized approach results in both a livelier and a more compelling interpretation than one would find if Maxwell had posited merely a binary opposition between victims (black writers) and victimizers (FBI agents). Sometimes he glides between the ghostreaders and their targets in a delicate performance of grace, wit, and erudition to catch each at unexpected angles. The superb organization, polish, and finesse of this book lifts our understanding of government surveillance of the artists to a new level, but it hardly ends all discussion. That is why Maxwell’s decision to place all fifty FBI files online on his website (http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes) is such a service. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 113, Number 3February 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/683378 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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