Government Intrusion and the Afro-Modernist Experience

A review of William J. Maxwell, F.B.Eyes. How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015.

William J. Maxwell’s exhaustively researched and compelling study uncovers and interprets the complicated history of the relation between African American literature and the J. Edgar Hoover-led Federal Bureau of Investigations.  Maxwell examines 51 FBI files requested through the Freedom of Information Act on prominent African American writers.  In reviewing the literally thousands of pages of records on those 51 figures who comprise what Maxwell broadly calls “Afro-modernism”—namely, the arts beginning with the Harlem Renaissance and ending with the Black Arts Movement—Maxwell wishes not only to point to the obsessive and intrusive monitoring of twentieth-century African American arts and their key producers, but the ironic intimacy that formed between these two dissimilar communities as a result of their “depth of contact” through literature (6).  Maxwell states: “my overarching aim is to read the files responsively as well as judgmentally, and to reconstruct rather than prosecute the meddling of the FBI in Afro-modernist letters, a collision of dissimilar cultural forces wrongly assumed to occupy disconnected worlds” (15).  The result is a multi-dimensional book covering a range of critical topics all governed by the central thesis that government invasion, surveillance, and manipulation of the Afro-modernist community and African Americans more generally was strangely a dialectical process of asymmetrical reinforcement through mutual hostility and suspicion.  Maxwell concludes through a set of five theses that Hoover’s construction of the FBI directly corresponds with his methods of monitoring the literary output of Afro-modernism, at once indirectly shaping the evolution of various Afro-modernist aesthetics, offering American literary works (and African-American literature particularly) sustained critical attention and, through continual meddling and manipulation, directly participating in the construction of the internationalist character of Afro-modernism.
 
In order to elucidate the forces at work in the interaction between Afro-modernism and the FBI, Maxwell’s book takes on an unusual heteroglossic form, ranging over a variety of topics written with a kind of bifurcated authorial persona, as if Maxwell were trying to target both an academic audience and a lay audience.  For instance, Maxwell may casually and somewhat loosely invoke Foucault or Agamben, defining key theoretical terms that are well known to academics when he’s in popular historical narrative mode.  Here it feels as if his primary audience is not so much the academic as the interested lay person. At other times he engages in fairly rigorous theoretical exposition, invoking current academic debates and providing context that seems directed to fellow academics.  The book covers a diverse range of topics too.  Among them: a history of New Criticism that elucidates the interpretive tactics often prevalent in the CIA in contradistinction to the FBI’s more ideologically minded approach; an overview of current trans-nationalist theory used to discuss key distinctions between the nation and the state and their various repressive regimes; a popular biography of Hoover and several other key FBI figures; historical overviews in the mode of popular history of key evolutionary moments in the FBI, including its on-again, off-again relationship with the Executive branch and with spy agencies and its adaptation to major events or periods; and formalist readings of bureaucratic documents side-by-side with readings of poems and novels.  Each of these often lengthy contextualizing frames can make one forget the central topic, namely, Afro-modernists and the FBI, because the subject of FBI surveillance of Afro-modernism drops out of the discussion for many pages at a time.  However, these contexts are also fascinating in their own right and crucial to and enlarge the story at hand.  In other words, while the thesis concerns the FBI/Afro-modernist correlation, the story gives the FBI and Afro-modernists the status of fully developed “characters,” complete with psychological idiosyncrasies and insecurities.  When Maxwell returns us to the main subject at hand, he is deftly able to move us back to the primary subject and shift fluidly from narrative to scholarly analysis and back again.  (Nonetheless, some may find the length of these digressions and the indecisiveness or inconsistency in authorial tone and voice and subject focus frustrating).
 
Woven through this eclectic, comprehensive study, then, is an epic noirish chronicle. The complex protagonists are represented by the cast of Afro-modernist writers struggling to “elevate or transcend their terms of engagement with the FBI, exposing unsightly facts about government spying while recycling them into imaginative fictions,” while the antagonists are represented by J. Edgar Hoover and the vast bureaucratic policing machine he constructed in part as a kind of jealous fascination of the artistic success and credibility of the very “subversive” element he sought to undermine (15).  The result of this hybrid endeavor is a thoroughly engaging look—though a somewhat uneven one—into this not-so-secret relationship.
 
Maxwell advances five broad theses.  The first argues that the FBI, and particularly Hoover’s hiring there in 1919, promoted a sustained interest in African American letters.  Initially this was a result of a deep suspicion of the New Negro and the literary self-refashioning of African Americans’s public image, but maintained and even intensified through the 1950s communist paranoia and through government interest in the Black Arts movement.  Maxwell notes Hoover’s expansion of the FBI’s own literary activities in the form of publications, reports, and crime bulletins, but also its development of a library, its involvement in the publishing industry, and its engagement in criticism to assess and monitor the content of, among other writings, those of Afro-modernism.  This “lit.-cop federalism,” as Maxwell terms it, was “state supervision pursued through a cluster of text-centered desires and activities ranging from the archival to the editorial, the interpretive to the authorial” (43).  The aim of “lit.-cop federalism” was to act as a counter-subversive force through public relations.  Hoover’s own book, Radicalism and Sedition among the Negroes as Reflected in their Publications, written along with several ghostreaders (that is, FBI readers) in the Bureau, provided an examination of the New Negro with a veritable academic rigor unseen in non-black academic circles.  The very public rebuttal of the so-called subversive activities of Afro-modernist texts demonstrated a careful critical examination and classification of African American arts.  While the “critical glosses” of Hoover’s book were “thin, steeped in a stunted interpretive code in which literary interest [was] measured by moral or ideological admissibility,” his book nonetheless served, ironically, as a platform for diligent, serious research, even halting admiration, concerning the arts and political defiance.
 
This ironic devotion to Afro-modernism was linked to the successful evolution of the FBI, the subject of Maxwell’s second thesis.  In order to continue the relentless monitoring of African American letters as the century unfolded, the FBI became increasingly involved in pervasive and totalizing modes of mimicry and control.  These were used to justify and ultimately quarantine the African American arts as seditious.  Initially, during the Harlem Renaissance, the FBI engaged in what Maxwell calls “counterliterature”: a method borrowed from counter-espionage in which spies mimic the espionage of an enemy agency in order to reverse the intended goal of the original espionage.  Maxwell uncovers a steady effort by ghostreaders to employ a counterliterature that “digested and repurposed the public voices of Afro-modernist authors … [and] endeavored to police black writing with some of its own imaginative medicine and succeeded in enriching the FBI’s authority and ambition at almost every phase of the process” (62).
 
Maxwell notes a Foucauldian fashioning of the dissident subject throughout the files, constructing the Afro-modernist through criminological typing, often through the aid of a counterliterature whose purpose was to “out-write an entire ethnic modernism” (75).  Once again, the Hoover Bureau ironically shared with modernism a sense of the ideological efficacy of art.  The Orwellian expansion of the FBI’s counterliterature program by the time of the Cold War to what Maxwell calls “Total Literary Awareness” saw a program put in place to screen suspicious books prior to publication or plays prior to production.  And by the time of the Black Arts movement, the FBI’s first “counterintelligence program” (COINTELPRO), which started as an anti-communist effort in 1956, was used for audio-surveillance, monitoring author-audience interactions, book collections, and, in the case of political figures and groups, even writing poison pen-letters and provoking conflicts.  Yet to maintain this counterliterature required an unprecedented expertise in Afro-modernism that bordered on admiration.
 
All this is to say that the FBI acted as an influential and perhaps even the most dedicated critic of African American literature—which is Maxwell’s third thesis.  Maxwell says that in combing through the FOIA files one can’t help but note they are “works of literary commentary, state-subsidized explications debating informal curricula and obliquely bidding for interpretive dominance” (130).  This prompts Maxwell to ask to what degree these “critic-spies” shared methodology with literary critiques of the day.  Here Maxwell takes us on a long excursion into the scholarly debates within academia concerning the proper methods of literary criticism and how these contrasting methods came to be embodied by the two competing spy agencies, the OSS/CIA and the FBI.  While the CIA—in a shorthand caricature—thought of the typical FBI man as a less educated, lower class Irish-Catholic, the FBI saw the typical CIA man as a snobby, WASPish prep boy from the Ivy Leagues.  This cultural clash corresponds to a methodological difference in literary reading: the CIA tended toward New Critical readings (prevalent in the Ivy Leagues at the time) while the FBI was fashioned out of the historical biographical method common prior to the rise of the New Critics in the 1920s, as exemplified in Hoover’s aforementioned analysis of so-called race literature.  However, as the FBI became more obsessed with rooting out communist dissidents in America, their readings took on an increasingly cultural slant.  In this its methods resembled in some ways Marxist interpretative strategies.  Thus the interpretive approach that the FBI brought to bear on Afro-modernism was complex, utilizing formalist, bibliographic historicist and, interestingly, quasi-Marxist techniques.
 
The fourth thesis proclaims that the FBI was instrumental in blocking and forcing the movements of black artists in and out of America, thus helping to produce the internationalist character of Afro-modernism.  This effort amounts to what Maxwell calls “state-sponsored transnationalism” (21).  When African American writers left for Paris after World War II, for instance, many developed paranoia that everyone was being monitored and that some ex-pats had been coopted to spy upon each other.  The most prominent such writer was Richard Wright, whose poem “The FB Eye Blues” details the intolerable invasiveness of being spied upon (and is the source of Maxwell’s title).  Maxwell’s study of author files confirms the suspicions of these writers: indeed, the FBI cancelled passports, placed stop notices on specific travelers, influenced printing presses and publishers, and sought to control the movements and authorial output of Afro-modernists whenever it could to mitigate what it felt was the growing “Pan-Africanist” threat of these writers.  Thus, the FBI patrolled the US borders, denying some African American writers re-entry to the US and not letting others leave.  Failing to prevent the black diaspora, the FBI sought to manage it.
 
The ubiquitous presence of the FBI may have created unmeasurable deleterious effects on the literary output of Afro-modernists; however, awareness of its ghostreaders created a literary backlash, most often seen in unpublished materials.  Thus, Maxwell’s fifth and final thesis notes the way in which the FBI marks “a deep and characteristic vein in African American literature” (215).  The extent of negative FBI influence is hard to measure because it is expressed in silence: by “the number of novels abandoned or banned from bookstores and libraries; the number of early radical poems unreprinted or apologized for; the number of whole literary careers shortened or never started” (22).  These are some of the effects of ghostreading.  A number of memoirs and author files verify FBI interrogations and interviews with family members.  Since Afro-modernism, as Maxwell has defined the term, refers to “the diverse body of audacious and self-consciously modern black American writing,” it is no surprise that this literary style incorporates the consciousness of ghostreading into its literary expression (221).  Indeed, Maxwell argues that the Afro-modernists “‘pre-responded’ to FBI inspection, internalizing the likelihood of Bureau ghostreading and publicizing its implications” (222), and in this rival such postmodernists as DeLillo and Pynchon.
 
The fifth section of Maxwell’s book then explores a range of writings, covering different historical stages of Afro-modernism and the parallel growing surveillance programs of the FBI during the Hoover era.  His methodology is to read with an eye toward the ghostreading audience, a novel literary critical approach that seeks the effects of ghostreading on the manner and method of expression and the consequences of the conclusions to be drawn from such readings. To give one example, Maxwell reads Richard Wright’s unpublished Island of Hallucination as an anti-paranoid novel, directly confronting the various layers of monitoring to which he believed he was subject from various agencies.  This work becomes typical of an “antifile,” Maxwell’s term for a “novelized counterinvestigation that represents and recodes known forms of state surveillance” (258). While intriguing enough as a specific interpretive approach, the larger point for Maxwell is to show the necessity of including the omnipresence of the FBI in the shaping of Afro-modernism, including rethinking some of the interpretive stances of individual works vis-à-vis their FB Eyed contexts, and even “the value of integrating histories of state surveillance not only into Black Atlantic theory…but also into the narrower field of African American literary history” (251).
 
FB Eyes is a significant contribution to American literary study. Not only does the book research the extensive and deeply troubling invasiveness of the FBI into the lives of African Americans and its profound, even if nebulous, effects on Afro-modernism, it also demands a reshaping of the field itself to more formally and directly address the issue of state intrusion into the arts.  Indeed, the very form of his study—a kind of postmodern collage of theoretical methods, authorial voices and narrative organization—suggests a novel kind of literary criticism in its own right.  What remains perhaps most important here, as Maxwell very rightly notes, at a time where revelations of vast surveillance programs of American citizens has come to light through Edward Snowden’s leaked CIA documents, understanding the continuing interaction of the spy agencies and cultural production seems perpetually relevant.