Black Ops

Abstract

This chapter turns to the African American counterconspiracy narrative, a genre that combines the African American literary tradition’s conception of race as conspiracy with tropes from the exhausted form of the noir detective novel. Novels of antiracist insurrection from the sixties and seventies argue for a form of black nationalism focused on the “authentic” space of the inner-city ghetto. The three novels I focus on here—The Spook Who Sat by the Door by Sam Greenlee and Chester Himes’s Blind Man with a Pistol and Plan B—envision the possibility of apocalyptic political action, but in doing so continue to rely on a historically distinct conception of black authenticity that imagines itself as the politically engaged alternative to a consumerist black middle-class.