rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: F.B. eyes
    sub title: how J. Edgar Hoover's ghostreaders framed African American literature
  title info:
    title: FBIs
  name:
    name part: Maxwell, William J.
    role:
      role term: creator
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nju
    date issued: 2015
    copyright date: 2015
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xiv, 367 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
  abstract: 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.
  note: William J. Maxwell.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
  subject:
    topic: American literature
    topic: African American authors
    topic: History and criticism
  subject:
    topic: American literature
    topic: African American authors
    temporal: 20th century
  subject:
    name:
      name part: United States.
      name part: Federal Bureau of Investigation
    topic: History
    temporal: 20th century
  classification: PS153.N5 M39 2015
  classification: 810.9/896073
  identifier: 0691130205
  identifier: 9780691130200
  identifier: 2014933936
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 141230
    record change date: 20151206125537.0
    record identifier: in00003494623