12/22/2023 0 Comments Ghostreader reviewsIn 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). ![]() 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). Edgar Hoover, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to police African American literature from 1919 to 1972. These were the men (exclusively) employed by J. Maxwell, professor of English literature at Washington University, steps into the darkly devious world of what he wryly christens US government “ghostreaders” (5).
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