Ghostreaders and Diaspora-Writers: Four Theses on the FBI and African American Modernism

Abstract

Since the winter of 2004, a parade of leaks and reluctant document dumps has sparked unease and controversy over revived political spying by the U.S. government. Disclosures of Pentagon eavesdropping on domestic peace groups have been followed by news of warrantless wiretapping by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI’s use of tens of thousands of “national security letters” to monitor the private communications of American citizens since the passage of the 2001 PATRIOT Act (ACLU Says). The present thus qualifies as a dramatically appropriate moment in which to inspect the historical links between American state sleuthing and African American speech. Even so, concern with the effects of federal surveillance on African American expression is hardly a unique product of the short, edgy twenty-first century. Well before the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allowed access to scores of formerly secret FBI files on Afro-modernist writers, these writers themselves contemplated how J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation surveyed and stirred up their work.