Part one/thesis one : The birth of the Bureau, coupled with the birth of J. Edgar Hoover, ensured the FBI's attention to African American literature

Part two/thesis two : The FBI's aggressive filing and long study of African American writers was tightly bound to the Agency's successful evolution under Hoover

Part three/thesis three : The FBI is perhaps the most dedicated and influential forgotten critic of African American literature

Part four/thesis four : The FBI helped to define the twentieth-century Black Atlantic, both blocking and forcing its flows

Part five/thesis five : Consciousness of FBI ghostreading fills a deep and characteristic vein of African American literature

Appendix : FOIA requests for FBI files on African American authors active from 1919 to 1972.

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The FBI against and for African American Literature

The Files and the FOIA

Five Theses and the Way Forward

Part One/Thesis One: The Birth of the Bureau, Coupled with the Birth of J. Edgar Hoover, Ensured the FBI's Attention to African American Literature

The Bureau before Hoover

Hoover before the Bureau

Bureau of Letters: Lit.-Cop Federalism, the Hoover Raids, and the Harlem Renaissance

Part Two/Thesis Two: The FBI's Aggressive Filing and Long Study of African American Writers Was Tightly Bound to the Agency's Successful Evolution under Hoover

Flatfoot Montage: The Genre of the Counterliterary FBI File

The Counterliterary State and the Charismatic Bureaucracy: Trimming the First Amendment, Fencing the Harlem Renaissance

Persons to Racial Conditions: Literary G-Men and FBI Counterliterature from the New Deal to the Second World War

Afro-Loyalty and Custodial Detention: Files of World War II

Total Literary Awareness: Files of the Cold War

COINTELPRO Minstrelsy: Files of Black Power

Part Three/Thesis Three: The FBI Is Perhaps the Most Dedicated and Influential Forgotten Critic of African American Literature

Reading Like a CIA Agent

Reading Like an FBI Agent

Critics behind the Bureau Curtain: Meet Robert Adger Bowen and William C. Sullivan

Ask Dr. Hoover: Model Citizen Criticism and the FBI's Interpretive Oracle

Part Four/Thesis Four: The FBI Helped to Define the Twentieth-Century Black Atlantic, Both Blocking and Forcing Its Flows

The State in the Nation-State

the State of the Transnational Turn

The State of Black Transnationalism

the State in the Black Atlantic

Checking Diasporan ID: Hostile Translation and the Passport Office.

State-Sponsored Transnationalism: The Stop Notice and the Travel Bureau

Jazz Ambassadors versus Literary Escapees

Part Five/Thesis Five: Consciousness of FBI Ghostreading Fills a Deep and Characteristic Vein of African American Literature

Reading Ghostreading in the Harlem Renaissance: New Negro Journalists and Claude McKay

Invisible G-Men En Route to the Cold War: George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison

Mysteries and Antifiles of Black Paris: Richard Wright, William Gardner Smith, and Chester Himes

Black Arts Antifiles and the "Hoover Poem": John A. Williams, James Baldwin, Sam Greenlee, Melvin Van Peebles, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez

Bureau Writing after Hoover: Dudley Randall, Ai, Audre Lorde, Danzy Senna, and Gloria Naylor

Appendix: FOIA Requests for FBI Files on African American Authors Active from 1919 to 1972

Notes

Works Cited

Index.