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This part argues that Afro-modernist literature “pre-responded” to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications with growing bluntness and embellishment over the years from 1919 to 1972 and beyond. Thus, the fifth and last of the book's five theses, and the one that finally involves closer encounters with black poems, stories, essays, and novels than with their silhouettes in FBI files: Consciousness of FBI ghostreading fills a deep and characteristic vein of African American literature. Section 1 examines decisive responses to FBI surveillance in both the early journalism and the foundational poetry of the Harlem movement. Section 2 charts the FBI's migrant status in Afro-modernism from the mid-1930s through the early Cold War. Section 3 focuses on the expatriate trio of Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes, and their interlocking fictions of Paris noir in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Section 4 widens its focus, owing to the profusion of black Bureau writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The final section sketches African American literature's less heated skirmish with the FBI after Hoover's death—a skirmish now led by black women including Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor.

Retracing some of the main lines of FBI history, this part demonstrates how Bureau counterliterature was stamped by four distinct phases of the institution's developing Hoover era, altogether long enough to form a kind of police Mesozoic. It examines the glamorous and violent phase of Bureau history between the New Deal and the early 1940s. It then analyzes the changing shape of Bureau counterliterature during World War II, and does the same for the McCarthy period. Finally, it reviews the creative upheaval in Bureau counterliterature during the Black Power 1960s and 1970s. Author files and adjoining documents disclose that Hoover's FBI, the principal custodian of “lit.-cop federalism,” angled during all these phases to enlarge the state's ability to determine aesthetic value, scheming and networking like some National Endowment for Artistic Gumshoes. But these documents likewise show that his Bureau pursued changeable, art-educated enhancements of police tactics, converting varying currencies of literary capital into novel forms of criminological capital. Through both types of meddling, the Bureau paved the way to this book's second thesis, of necessity its most historically sprawling: The FBI's aggressive filing and long study of African American writers was tightly bound to the agency's successful evolution under Hoover.

This part illuminates the interpretive assumptions of Bureau ghostreading against the backdrop of the best-documented entanglement of American criticism with American espionage: namely, the firsthand stamp of the New Criticism on the counterintelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Section 1 explores CIA-endorsed formalism, its high-wire, Yale-rooted history, which was eventually integrated into FBI critical practice. Section 2 confirms that the Bureau ghostreaders cobbled together a distinct mode of FBI reading decades before the CIA's creation, a didactic yet meticulous biohistoricism in sympathy with academic schools of the late 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. Section 3 looks into the background and outlook of the FBI agents tasked with criticizing Afro-modernism. Finally, section 4 assesses the impact of FBI ghostreading on an interested non-Bureau audience: the self-appointed model citizens who turned to Hoover as a literary-critical wise man and potential literary-critical collaborator. This part proposes the third and thus far most literary of the five theses: The FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature.

This part marshals the largely uncompiled evidence of FBI author files to suggest that the worst suspicions about the stakeout of Paris noir were basically correct—that Wright was not too wrong, it follows, when he darkly joked that any African American “who is not paranoid is in serious shape,” at least if he or she sought literary license outside the United States during the Hoover era. Two decades before American involvement in World War II opened the floodgates of black Paris, the FBI began to influence the movements of expatriate Afro-modernists—this even as it manipulated “lit.-cop federalism” to nationalize itself in the mind of white America. In the French capital of black transnationalism, and satellites beyond, FBI agents and informers kept tabs on a network of black literary travelers they hoped to link by the vulnerabilities of statelessness alone. Thus, this book's fourth thesis: The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows.

This introductory chapter demonstrates how nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African American literature and print culture used Victorian literature to conduct acts of “African Americanization.” Here, close engagement with Victorian literature represented no mere capitulation to existing constraints, but instead constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression. The chapter shows that this practice did not impede or undercut the development of a distinctive African American literary culture and tradition, but on the contrary contributed directly to its development. It did so through the very repetition of African Americanizing engagements, repetition that grew increasingly self-conscious and self-referential, as writers and editors built on, responded to, and positioned themselves in relation to prior instances. Victorian literature's role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture, the chapter also argues, makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature.

This part aims to add depth and detail to less-familiar portraits of Hoover as a young militant, and to establish the character of the also young law enforcement agency he joined in the wake of World War I. Explaining why Hoover and the Bureau began to pursue African American writing, it presents the first of five theses: namely, The birth of the Bureau, coupled with the birth of J. Edgar Hoover, ensured the FBI's attention to African American literature. Section 1 recounts how the pre-Hoover Bureau emerged amid the social divisions of early twentieth-century America, and how it cultivated both literary publicity and public anti-New Negroism to whet an undivided national appetite for federal policing. Section 2 examines how the pre-Bureau Hoover managed his surprising familiarity with Afro-America. Section 3 establishes that with Hoover's hiring by the Bureau during the first Red Scare and the dawn of Harlem's cultural rebirth, the FBI's racial and literary preoccupations only deepened. Under Hoover's watch, the earliest Harlem Renaissance writing became the common passion of Bureau anti-New Negroism and “lit.-cop federalism,” the latter defined as the effort to inject a compelling federal police presence into the U.S. print public sphere.

This introductory chapter first discusses the FBI's surveillance African American writers and imitation of black prose as part of its struggle against African American protest. It argues that unlike nearly every other institution of U.S. literary study, prone to showing interest only during well-promoted black renaissances, the Bureau rarely took its eyes off the latest in African American writing between 1919 and 1972. And during this more-than-fifty-year period, the whole of its Hoover era, it never dismissed this writing as an impractical vogue relevant only to blacks (or to bleeding-heart white “Negrotarians,” for that matter). Relying on dueling public documents of African American literature and FBI literary commentary, the book helps establish their surprising depth of contact between spy-critics and black Bureau writers. An overview of the four parts of the book is also presented.

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.

Nicole J. Aljoe, Eric Gardner, and Molly O’Hagan Hardy describe the development of Just Teach One Early African American Print and its focus on texts excluded from critical and historical narratives of black literature. The chapter describes JTO: EAAP’s plans to link its work with other DH projects like the Early Caribbean Digital Archive and the Colored Conventions Project, and to build bridges to lesser-known collections, including historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and church collections, in order to aid text sharing, identification, preservation, and technological engagement. Recognizing its responsibility to preserve black cultural heritage, the essay describes JTO: EAAP’s decision to use TEI standards to encode texts on the site and provides an extended example from Aljoe’s classroom project on “Theresa: A Haytien Tale.”

Tisha Brooks writes about a digital anthology assignment in her 200-level African American literature survey in which students act as “knowledge curators.” Brooks’s assignments use literary and visual texts to “bridge multiple literacies and historical gaps,” and to encourage students to think critically about representations of violence against black bodies. Student work culminates in a group digital anthology project that helps them “move from mere consumers of knowledge to critical thinkers who use the archive to make meaning of its artifacts and the history and literature connected to them.” By selecting multimedia artifacts across periods, students become adept at representing the historical continuities between past and present.

This chapter explores politics in literature, interpreting New Negro politics as a paradigm. New Negro politics accounts for a cultural formation that sought to overcome the prevailing theme that African Americans were inferior and unassimilable in American “civilization.” It also sought to prove that African Americans, then described as a race, could be uplifted in moral, educational and cultural ways. Indeed, African American intellectuals used literature to explain or critique racial uplift and its cultural implementation as political action. Focusing on criticism and function, the chapter shows that the correlation between African American communities and racial-uplift ideology had translated into special rhetorical, aesthetic, and thematic features constituting the political tradition of African American literature at the turn into the twentieth century.

This chapter spells out what exactly it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African–American studies. Selectively examining key texts from various disciplines, it sketches the lineaments of a widely registered crisis in the idea of black community and specifies the problems of racial representation sparked by this crisis. To distinguish postmodern from modern projects of racial representation, it looks closely at exemplary efforts to forge new forms of community suited to the changed realities of the post-Civil Rights period. These entail a shift from uplift to populist and from print to vernacular paradigms of black intellectual work. It is argued that even as they stress their critical distance from previous models of black community, postmodern cultural critics find it difficult to legitimize their own claims to racial representation without reanimating the cultural politics of 1960s black nationalism. In the domain of print literature, antirealism and textual self-reflection are generally identified as the unique elements of postmodern black fiction and said to disable essentialist constructs of black culture and community. Such assumptions are disputed through a comparative analysis of Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and John Edgar Wideman's Reuben. In their common effort to incarnate the black urban writer in the image of Thoth, Egyptian god of writing, these novels explicitly engage the difficulties of resolving postmodern problems of racial representation through the medium of print literature.

This concluding chapter explores African American literature and print culture in the following century. Here, the prestige and popularity of most Victorian literature—and of Victorian literature as a category—diminished rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks in good part to the rise of modernism. Moreover, when twentieth-century African American writers looked abroad for cultures that seemed freer from racial prejudice or even the pressures of racialized identity than the United States, their gaze shifted from Britain elsewhere. France in particular took on this role, while also becoming the privileged site of black internationalism, with Paris viewed as “a special space for black transnational interaction, exchange, and dialogue.” Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, notions of racial authenticity also reinforced this turn away from Victorian literature, not only for its whiteness but also for its association with gentility and middle-class values. Indeed, these same attitudes have shaped the dominant critical reception of the Victorian presence in African American literature and print culture until quite recently.

This essay argues that black cultural production responded to the progression-regression paradox of black politics—political progress on the one hand and obstructions to that progress on the other—by employing pragmatic political imaginative possibility (PPIP). In response to neoliberalism, black masculinist politics, slavery’s legacies, intraracial gender antagonisms, and anti-civil rights backlash, black cultural production uses PPIP to provide a radical solution to various obstructions to black freedom. The chapter foregrounds the black women’s literary renaissance as central to this artistic trend, demonstrating how it, alongside other modes of cultural expression, imagines how to make our world anew. The introduction insists that these artistic solutions require us to think outside of the existing sociopolitical order, using our imaginations to achieve freedom.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the political value of African American literature through an examination of Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama. Prior to their careers as elected officials, both men wrote books that had been influential in shaping public opinion on the nation's democratic potential as well as on their own personal, political, and presidential qualifications. In 1776, Jefferson coauthored the Declaration of Independence, and in 1787, he published an authoritative ethnography of early America. Meanwhile, Obama released three bestselling books of autobiographical nonfiction and public policy. Evidently, African American literature fueled their political imaginations. Thus, this book looks at African American literature's role in political imagination and political action—to the extent that it can facilitate social change—and political action's role in the African American literary imagination.